What she’s pretty sure she needs is a philosophy. Some kind of life mantra that will make her love her job, her friends, her relationship, her stomach, and everything that ultimately grows out of and away from it. Such a philosophy would rejuvenate her back account, refresh her lately lackluster work ethic, and make her the kind of passionate person that could tame even the most cynical of ancient curmudgeons.
A goal would help. She never understood this though, when anyone giving advice recommends having a goal. Miranda can’t think of a certain, particular goal. Does that mean she doesn’t have one? That her life doesn’t have purpose? Is she lazy, taking life for granted? Heading down the previously paved road of indifference? On her way to a death bed where she’ll suddenly be slammed with the thing that she’s always wanted, that thing that’s been resting in whatever part of a person the "core" actually is, when they talk about it as being connected to the soul and not the rectus abdominus. That thing that’s been pushing her in no determined direction, that she keeps trying to feed but can never seem to get to. Is it children? Should she be procreating? Is Miranda actually deeply craving family? Or is it an island in her kitchen? Should she be knee deep in renovations?
Its this very grey area of uncertainty, she realizes, that make those stupid publications geared to women so successful. Maybe you want some thing. Maybe you don’t know what it is. Maybe you sometimes wish you were somewhere else. Maybe sometimes you are brutally unsatisfied and unhappy for what you think is no apparent reason, but there must be a reason, feelings don’t just come out of nowhere. There is something silently alive in you, engraved in your pulse, that gives one meaning to everything you are suppose to do. It puts the lines in your fingerprints, the pattern in your footprint, the letters in your DNA, and all those sighs in your breath. Maybe you don’t know what it is. Maybe you only know that something is inherently missing. So you reach for pages assembled by clearly put together people who claim to have figured it out. You need a new kitchen. You need a paint job. A new driveway. A new man. You need pots and pans, electric toothbrushes, and George Foreman grills. You need lotion and creams, colors in your wardrobe, inches under your heels, and a slice off your thighs. You should create. Create your space. Create yourself. Create someone else. Let no one ever be left wondering what it is YOU stand for. You are, after all, an independent, strong, millennium inspired woman. Aren’t you? AREN’T you? Shiny pages of sparkling kitchens and dining rooms, perfectly placed and planned out. Interior decorating that exhausts Miranda just to look at, imagining how one learns what fits in to which corner, what color goes with which wall to bring out the tint in this drape the oughta compliment the pigment in her, wait, isn’t pigment part of your skin? Where does one start when trying to assemble themselves and their surroundings? To make sure one doesn’t end up on their death bed trying to salvage some meaning in to a life they thought they were living but evidently weren’t? How does one determine their own destiny? ‘Be the purveyor of your own destiny’, the pages insist over and over again. What the fuck, Miranda wonders, is a ‘purveyor’ anyways? Do they mean ‘curator’? Should she be buying art? Or just find meaning it? Should she be examining her own materialistic attachments? Or buying economic greeting cards at her local bookstore, crafted by local artists on paper recycled from trees with proceeds going to support the downtown women’s shelter and soup kitchen? Should she be volunteering? Nonchalantly searching for herself behind the guise of assisting others in need. Maybe they mean ‘conveyor’. Maybe she should be at the airport. Maybe she should be traveling the world and taking it all in, deciding for herself if you really do have to wander further than your own backyard in these modern times to see if the world actually is as small as they say. If the whole place is no more than a handful of villages, if we all really are connected. Or maybe she’s suppose to be buying art from India, or Africa, or somewhere foreign and exotic. That she can hang on her burnt orange walls and use as conversation starters whenever she’s entertaining people. Over perfectly sparkling wine goblets, someone might ask about where this or that interesting piece came from, and Miranda could again nonchalantly laugh and reply, "Oh, is there ever a story attached to that! Let me tell you! I was in a back alley in Zimbabwae when all of the sudden"…then pelt them over their middle class suburban heads with her not only wonderfully furnished condo, but tales of high jinx on the high seas. Miranda’s life, she’d show them, would not be with anything left over. Or small.

What she’d really like is for someone to describe her as quirky. Or wonderfully weird. Or unconventional. What she’d love is to know that Henry loves being with her because she makes everything more fun. Somehow. That she has some kind of take on life that is refreshing and maybe even whimsical. But she figures such people must bounce through life, excitedly pursuing its next adventure, following their hearts effortlessly, as they’ve learned to do. Such feats, she thinks, can’t be attained living nonchalantly. Miranda never wants to lose her chalants. What she’d like is for things to come together, to stop feeling like isn’t doing this painfully obvious thing that would turn her in to some kind of prodigy.
What she figures would help is a life philosophy. What she wants is an effervescent moment of insight, like ones from the movies, or that writers of weight loss articles in magazines have where on some far fetched day, either under certain spectacular circumstances or not, they saw something in particular differently than they had been doing all along and suddenly realized was wrong. Followed by an effortlessly summed up change of pattern, way of thinking, and living: ‘I simply attached my wagon to a different star. I finally put my eggs in to their proper basket. I attached myself to the right wagon. I changed courses. I changed direction. I started CBT. I sleep more. I eat better. Have increased energy during the day and prolonged endurance at night, and have noticed that nothing simply bothers me anymore. I stopped smoking. Switched to red wine – only one glass a day, even the queen does it – and uncluttered my seemingly hectic life. I ditched those that don’t truly inspire me and now only surround myself with positive, bright, enthusiastic people that I of course COULD live without, because I also sorted through my assorted dependency issues, but wouldn’t WANT to – and yet still manage to maintain a full time job in the company of people who only ever and always simplify my now uncluttered, enriched, evolving, nourishing, anti-aging, stress reducing, sexual drive increasing life.’
What she knows, is that she likes things to be quirky. She’s always found a poignancy in things that don’t appear to take themselves too seriously. She knows she wants something. She knows she sometimes feels like something still hasn’t happened yet. She knows there is a reason she finds comfort and inspiration in the idea that on any day, something might happen that has never happened before. But how does that translate in to a goal? How does she find out what it is? Because its there. And sometimes it’s screaming. What she doesn’t get, is how you can want something so badly, and not even know what it is?