We have a new president, and I'm very excited to see what the future holds with the new administration. I know that it will be a lot of work to undo an eight-year-old tangled mess, a job akin to removing a million toothpicks from a giant haystack covered in glue. But my excitement is not just about that undoing, but also the doing of new actions to make America and the world a better place.

Sure, that's a very optimistic view, but that's what change does... to me, at least.

And one of the biggest changes that I realized after the inauguration was how I perceive and feel about the leader of our country. For too many years, I felt that our (now former) president was like a drunken bus driver with the music on too loud and a total ignorance of the brake pedal. The best I could hope for was that he literally didn't kill us all and that eventually the bus would run out of gas. Add to that a feeling of embarrassment, disbelief, and at times, outright hopelessness, and that's what the president meant to me.

It had been so long that I didn't realize how I felt until that feeling changed on Inauguration Day 2009. There's a new bus driver now, and even though we've barely left the station, I now hope that we're going to a better America. I feel excited, hopeful, trusting, and inspired now that Barack Obama is our president. Could those feelings change? Absolutely. But it's nice to feel this way now, and to believe that while those feelings can change in the future, they won't have to.

It's the start of a new era, and the hope it brings simply feels good.

Congratulations, President Barack Obama! And congratulations, America!