My 32nd birthday approaches. Not quite a month off and people are starting to ask me how I am celebrating it. I don’t have an answer. I am getting old. I can’t figure out where things have gone.

(There is a beautiful girl on the train as I write this. She looks almost like Charlotte from Sex in the City, but more real and foreign. I keep wondering what she is listening to on her iPod. I’m still trying to get into the new Portishead album. “Machine Gun,” the first single, is sadly the best song on the album.)

Right. So I’m old. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past months thinking heavily about happiness. About success. How these things are measured, accumulated, ranked. Needed.

I’ve been gathering all my creative works for months, trying to gather them in ways that could be useful in the future. I’ve been trying to figure out what I’ve done, what I want to do. And how best to do it.

And you know what? These are hard questions. Not hard questions like “Hey, how do we want to architect this filesystem?” or “What does the db schema look like for an arbitrary tree structure where any node can exist in an infinite number of other trees at the same time?”

No, those are silly examples of “daytime” problems. I’m talking about the nighttime problems. The ones that sometimes keep me up, the ones that move me quickly on some days and slowly on others.

The nighttime problems revolve around happiness. About being alive, about finding a niche, about defining success.

It is arguable that everything I do is connected to this set of topics, indeed everything we all do is connected to our own happiness in some way. But over the next while, I want to break it down into discreet ideas and topics. I want to poke at it some and really try to find some nuggets. I want to deconstruct (or attempt to) most every bit of my life. Here.

There will still be links and silliness and stuff. But this is as good a place as any to also talk about the things that have been keeping me awake, the things that scare me, the things that delight me.

I have been motivated by fear for quite some time. Roxy is doing a brilliant job at forcing me to open up more. But I shouldn’t and can’t be dependent on her. And I’ve slowly moved from writing about my personal life as it has gotten more…personal.

But, as with everything, there is a balance. So I’m going to find it.

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