Free It Chooses You by Miranda July Page B

communion. I found myself paying him a little bit more than everyone else, as if this would somehow level things out. Because of all the people I had met, Domingo was certainly the poorest. Not the saddest, not the most hopeless, but the person whom I felt most creepily privileged around. We drove home, in my Prius. If I interacted only with people like me, then I’d feel normal again, un-creepy. Which didn’t seem right either. So I decided that it was okay to feel creepy, it was appropriate, because I was a little creepy. But to feel only this way would be a terrible mistake, because there were a million other things to notice.
    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. Domingo was compulsive and free-floating, seemingly unashamed, and his insides, his dreams, were taped to the walls. That night Brigitte sent me the day’s photographs; I looked through all of them, in case there were things that I had missed by actually being there. I studied a picture of Domingo’s calendar. “Today is my birthday,” read one square. “I’m 45 years old, an old man.” I imagined that being forty-five seemed totally implausible to him, given that he had no wife, no babies, no job, none of the trappings of time as they are described to all of us.



I clicked through all the pictures Brigitte had taken so far. What was looking for? I supposed I was looking for calendars. More pictures of calendars. And there they were. Everyone had them, and they were all hardworking calendars. They seemed weirdly compulsive for a moment, as if I’d stumbled on a group of calendar fanatics, and then I remembered that we all used to have these, until very, very recently. We all laid our intricately handwritten lives across the grid and then put it on the wall for everyone to see. For a split second I could feel the way things were, the way time itself used to feel, before computers.
    Trying to see things that are invisible but nearby has always been alluring to me. It feels like a real cause, something to fight for, and yet so abstract that the fight has to be similarly subtle. When I was in my early twenties, making performances and fanzines and trying to conceive of myself as a filmmaker, I felt certain that this task was harder not simply because there were so few movies made by women, but because this felt normal, even to me. So I set out to make myself able to feel the absence of these movies made by women. I interviewed teenage girls and busy mothers and old women on the streets of Portland, stopping them and asking, “If you could make a movie, what would it be about?” I compiled their answers and portraits into a poster called “The Missing Movie Report.” Some of the answers were interesting, most weren’t. But was I feeling the absence now? Now that I’d called upon them, were these unmade movies changing me, like ghosts? The results of the report were inconclusive.
    It was a similarly annoying question, but I doggedly asked each PennySaver seller if they used a computer. They mostly didn’t, and though they had a lot to say about other things, they didn’t have much to say about this, this absence. I began to feel that I was asking the question just to remind myself that I was in a place where computers didn’t really matter, just to prompt my appreciation for this. As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
    I don’t mean that I really thought this, out loud; it was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it