With the cratering worldwide economy and endless war and terrorism and greed and corruption and bigotry, 2008 was a prodigiously bad year for a lot of people in a lot of ways. There were so many losers, it’s easy to forget the winners, like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Rafael Nadal, Michael Phelps, Rachel Maddow, Tina Fey, Meryl Streep, and Robert Downey, Jr., to name a few off the top of my head. May 2009 be as good to the rest of us as 2008 was to them.

It probably isn’t a good idea to have high expectations for the new year. We already know it’s going to be a tough year, and the most we can hope for is that it gives us hope for the year to follow, and the ones after that. But we can also hope that 2009 brings us more joys than sorrows, and more hope than disappointment. It’s probably best not to be too specific in our hopes at this point.

But hey, you never know. We could be like the Miami Dolphins, 1-15 last season and now division champions. We could be like the Tampa Bay Rays, who were better than the Yankees this year despite having a fraction of the money to spend. Sometimes you have to learn to do more with less. That seems to be the theme for 2009, and it hasn’t even started yet.

This journal is nine years old today. When I started, I was a young man of fifty, and now I stand a few weeks short of turning sixty. I could never have anticipated the changes in the world in these nine years, but I’ve recorded my reactions to many of those changes, and my thoughts about what they mean. I’ve made some dear friends through this journal, and that’s the main reason I hope to keep it going for a few years longer. Happy new year to all.