Display recent posts excluding certain categories

Hello!

I have a static main page where I also display the last five recent posts. I want to exclude specific categories from this list.

This is the code I’m currently using:

<?php
$args = array(
  'numberposts' => 1,
  'cat' => journal
  );
$posts=get_posts($args);
if ($posts) {
foreach($posts as $post) {
setup_postdata($post);
?>
<p><a>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
<h3 class="entry-title"></a><a>" title="<?php printf(__('Permalink to %s', 'veryplaintxt'), wp_specialchars(get_the_title(), 1)) ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title() ?></a></h3>
<div class="entry-date"><abbr class="published" title="<?php the_time('Y-m-d\TH:i:sO'); ?>"><?php unset($previousday); printf(__('%1$s', 'veryplaintxt'), the_date('j F, Y', false)) ?></abbr></div><?php the_content(); ?>
<p>
—<?php veryplaintxt_author_hCard(); ?>
<?php }
}
?>

It might be pretty messy, I don’t know. Where should I change/add the information to exclude a specific category from appearing?

Or if someone is bored/kind enough to clean up what is probably an egregious block of code, I would be most appreciative. Thank you, WordPress community.

I love you all.