It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.
Catalog
Miranda July
Miranda July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger; February 15, 1974) is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, author and artist. Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital media presentations, and live performance art. She wrote, directed and starred in the films Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011). Her most recent book - and debut novel - The First Bad Man, was published in January 2015. July was a recipient of a Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award. 2Background July was born in Barre, Vermont, in 1974, the daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. Her parents, who taught at Goddard College at the time, are both writers. In 1974 they founded North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles. Her father was Jewish, and her mother was Protestant. July was encouraged to work on her short fiction by author and friend of a friend Rick Mood
I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.
Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I'd be interviewing air and water and…
All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.
Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment?
I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.
I was going to die and it was taking forever.
There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.
I walked down the hall and saw that [she] was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It's a slippery slope, and it's best just to sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you're not sure if you are…
If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him.
That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down as if I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest.
I wondered if i would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself.
Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it's worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these…
What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.
I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.
It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying.
Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.
Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.