In the rearview mirror

By Carl

The year is ending today. Please accept my best and fondest wishes for a healthy, and happy New Year. May your best day of 2008 be your worst day of 2009.

I think I suffer from Bush Fatigue. Eight years of a good president is wearing. Eight years of a bad president is exhausting. Knowing full well that he's leaving at the end January, one is tempted to ask if there's any way he can hurry along.

I have hopes for Obama's presidency. They used to be high hopes, until the markets melted away and the economy went in the pan. Now, I just hope he can stop the bleeding and sew up a few of the bigger wounds. He should win a second term (it's hard to unelect a president -- just look at 2004), by which we will have been firmly on the road to recovery.

I think. I hope. It would be hard to imagine a crisis so severe that it would outlast a President's term but there you have it.

Barring a major outbreak of amazing news -- it could happen! -- I should end 2009 about as well as 2008 ends. 2008 saw the collapse of several things in my life, from my health to some family issues that really need to be taken care of. The shocks are over, the regrouping has begun. I figure it will take about a year to recover. This is my time to praise my Jesus for keeping an eye on me, and giving me good friends who have not been afraid to stand up to me and question what I'm all about.

I've made it hard on a lot of you this year, and for that, I am sorry. I've purposely distanced myself in order to give myself some breathing room to examine all that's gone on in the world and in my world. I hope you'll understand. If our friendships cannot survive that, then perhaps we were not meant to be friends in the first place.

I started the year with some goals, and I think I've achieved a few of them. One was to make my blog Simply Left Behind a voice in Blogtopia (© Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo).

More important, my blog won the Weblog Award. I'm nominated again (I'll link the pages and such later this week). I hope to work my magic one more time.

I guest-blogged at Crooks and Liars for a week.

More important to me is not to watch my hit counter rack up points every day, but to see my ideas echo along the corridors of Blogtopia and the blogosphere from time to time. Every so often, I'll see someone quote a piece of mine (I can see the incoming links) and read a discussion about the idea. This is good. This is why I blog. I got this massive brain, the size of a planet, and it would be a damned shame to keep all of the thoughts inside. And for convincing me to do this, I have to thank Katrina. Again.

I promise to work harder on this, to hone my writing and critical thinking (and to perfect my grammar and spelling) and make it easier to coalesce the way I see this world into things that can be talked about. I don't have the time, like a lot of the furry mammalian bloggers, to sit and think and read and edit. I write these posts sitting at my desk at work, and even MIS is getting antsy about that much time spent. It means I will have to work harder at making myself clear.

I want to do this without losing sight of something valuable to be: the transparent thought process. A careful reader of my work will notice every once in a while I'll post something disjointed. This simply means I haven't considered everything yet, but that I feel strongly one way already. I don't want to lose that, because in sharing my thoughts, I share a bit of myself with you.

As well, it gives my reader the opportunity to take his or her own journey with me. It's been fun sometimes to correspond, in comments or email, about a nugget of information and see where things go.

2009 projects to be a quiet year, from a blog standpoint. I don't see where Obama has many choices about what he can and cannot do, so I can't imagine he'll make any significantly controversial decisions. We've pretty much hashed out his policies for the first half of the year, and I don't see him as having the courage to take a real risk with the economy as tattered as it is.

I hope I'm wrong, of course. I like watching my hit counter soar!

(Cross-posted at Simply Left Behind.)