I believe most people I know -- people who mainly live in the first world, who check small glowing screens several hundred times a day to be validated of their importance -- are concerned pretty regularly about their own happiness. I think about happiness in an evaluative way several times a day. Am I having a good day? Why am I not having a good afternoon when my morning was so full-feeling? When will I feel happy again? I suppose I believe myself entitled to happiness, much the same way I believe myself entitled to good food and hot showers and when I am deprived of these things, I expect that I will find some shred of compassion from somewhere because, How sad to go without.

Happiness always comes in certain measure for me after the cold and the gray of winter passes and spring stops flirting and actually sticks around. I have a strong burden to be happy on those perfect weather days. I feel like the dinged-up floor model of the human being if I can't just be happy all day on the days when everyone else is outside celebrating sundress season and tossing frisbees. There's actually a lot of pressure to be ecstatic, have you noticed? Today people spoke on the social media about the opening day of baseball season and it was like the chains of slavery, apartheid and Prohibition had all simultaneously been unshackled and now we could eat, drink and be merry from sea to shining sea.

What I want in my thirties is so much less and so much more. I don't want the long weekend full of spectacle and best-laid plans and friends jetsetting in from out of town. I don't need all that to be happy. I just want the weekend not to pass so quickly. I want to hold on to kite of happiness as it unspools and I want to keep it up in the air just so long enough that I can remember it and before it dips and nose-dives toward the ground. I want feelings and reminders of how good and sweet this life is and all its accoutrements to remain in my pocket in tact even after I launder my jeans. I don't care about the prize in the box. I just want to sit and enjoy my Crakcer Jack until at least the seventh-inning stretch, even if it's not opening day.