Good Riddance
One is supposed to look ahead after New Year’s day, ready to tickle the 2010 baby and make it laugh. But I want to take one last look back at 2009 to say “good riddance” to a year marked by layoffs and unemployment, medical procedures, legal troubles, ill focus, worry, disappointment, and anguish. December ended well, however, so well that I have high hopes for 2010—higher than I’ve had for any new year in the past half-dozen. Whether things will remain so high remains to be seen, but at least it’s starting somewhere good.
For this post I thought to make a chart of the year’s highs and lows, but after thinking about it, I realized the chart is really too arbitrary to be of any use. All the mixedness of mixed emotions, for example, is collapsed into a single up or down slope; the entire chart is interpretation disguised as empiricism. So I won’t use the thing as a representation of 2009, but I will link to it for your amusement. The exercise led me to this: I think it would be fascinating to review a year’s worth of data from a daily surveys of one person’s emotions.
