I turn 32 tomorrow. Eight years left.

When I set about to become a "CPA by forty", I figured that's far enough off in the future that I could decently get away with taking my time about it while still focusing on my goal and making a point to do everything I need to do in order to achieve it. With tomorrow marking birthday number 32, I've got eight years before the big four-oh hits and I say I either succeeded or failed.

Happily, stage one of a journey that is to the brain and psyche what the Tour de France is to Lance Armstrong's legs has concluded with me in possession of the yellow jersey, metaphorically speaking. I pulled a 4.0 for nine credits in summer session while taking classes that are incidental to my actual goal. My first accounting class starts this fall and I'm not entirely sure I still know a debit from a credit from when I took Basic Bookkeeping in the summer of 1998. Eleven years have gone by since I've studied the subject that will, gods willing, become my career because I was a management major (a more ill-suited major to my personality I can't rightly fathom) my first time through school.

If the relative ease with which I was able to get through the first semester of this new effort is anything to go by, I'd say that a decade of age, experience, wisdom, and lost adolescence has done me some good. I'm still a year, maybe two, away from having to think about internships, career networking, and the like. I'm a full-time student first and foremost. I'm well aware that the single greatest potential obstacle to success, my introverted nature, is still looming like the wall on a military obstacle course, but for now I'm going to celebrate my birthday, offer a prayer to the gods for continued physical and mental health, and spend most of this summer playing way too many video games because there will be a point sooner than I realize where leisure will be as precious to me as water to someone stranded in the desert.