I think there was just an earthquake while I was typing that sentence. Can that possibly be, can the world be in such perfect synchrony if only for a moment? The sofa is shaking, and I didn�t hear anything like a big truck rumbling by. It is just after 6:20 pm.

Yeah, so. Not a surprise, but not pleasant all the same to hear the news, which I did on Thursday morning. Oh, and here is the other good part, my manager consented to keep matters under wraps so I don�t have to spend a week with people coming up to me and saying Oh how terrible but of course someone like you has another job already lined up and me having to say Well actually no and the temp market is so crap that I�ve given up and why don�t you stop by my locker sometime if you�re ever up at the community college. (I suppose I could also say something more self-aggrandizing, referencing the wherewithal � if you dig � but that�s not very stylish, or sporting. Though, ha, the same is probably true of referencing the non-reference.) I will get to sneak out in the middle of the night, cleaning off my desk and taking down my nameplate so that, the next morning, the eternal cycle can begin again. The good part is that I�ll be so totally out of the picture that nobody will be able to call my ass for help, ever. Anyway, I got the boot and then I got my purse and hopped a bus to the testing center and then spent some time looking at the posted list of available classes and making a plan for Tuesday. On the clock, mais oui. So all this is really happening, beginning in a few days� time. If you know anyone who�s selling a used sewing machine, and not one of these chintzy new ones but maybe an old Singer, let me know.

Ring out the old, right? I�m hanging out, drinking a few cups of New Years� ramp-up coffee � why does that apostrophe look so wrong? � and waiting for Steve to get home so we can start getting ready to go to Mandy�s. He got me an Austrian crystal necklace for Christmas that a woman walked across the restaurant to compliment me on a few nights ago and that happens to look brilliant with my sequined tube top. I�m slogging through all the application stuff and, entertainingly, being regaled by the slick marketing packages and slicker scholarship promises mailed to me by institutions not usually associated with academic rigor that seem to have sniffed out my test score. At the University of Miami, the associate director of admissions� business card has her photograph on it, like she�s a real estate agent (and why do real estate agents do that?), and the brochure advertises the "world-renown faculty." Pepperdine�s come-on line is "Combine the business opportunities with a scenic environment." And that hussy North Carolina State sends me e-mail every few days, bossing me around like a dominatrix � the subject header on the last one is "What to expect when you apply to NC State." It�s kind of fun, it�s like watching one of those deeply bad TV shows that you can�t help talking back to, spouting snarky derision from your perch on the sofa. You know you�re taking cheap shots and that talking to appliances is not how you want to be remembered and that you should get up and do something productive like maybe the dishes, but you feel big and smug and funny despite yourself. I am proud to say that thus far I have resisted watching the CD-ROMs some of these outfits send. Pitt wants to take me to dinner, which would require me to miss a German class, but I�m tempted to because Pitt has a concentration in something called competitive intelligence and I can�t figure out what it is, I am interested in knowing. From what I can discern � which is not much, which aggravates my itch � it�s the legal version of what sounds like corporate espionage. How can they do that? Or am I all wrong? And as my sister said: "Hello � free dinner?" Knowledge is power: It might be a good time to show up and eat free dinner and pretend, a temporary espionage agent myself, that I�m ready to sign up for a hitch in their army. Then again, Pitt hoses its students for upwards of fifty grand a year, and if I�m part of the dinner I�m part of the problem.

I am mysteriously bereaved over Jerry Orbach�s death. I�ve got L&O in the background � forever untalkbackable-to � and at each commercial break there�s the message "TNT remembers Jerry Orbach. We will miss you" and I�m having trouble not tearing up. Did anyone else notice, earlier this week, that the NYT seemed to miscalculate the level of reader interest in Orbach compared to Sontag? The first day�s obituaries were four well-researched pageviews versus two fairly rote ones with recycled quotations, but in subsequent days the editors seemed to realize their error � I think in a lot of people�s intellectual lives Sontag was a presence as a curiosity, or more accurately a phenomenon � and there was not only another, more fleshed-out piece on Orbach, was it a revision?, but several others attesting to his presence as a character, a personification of something that we all seem to wish for, or to wish is true.

My laptop is insisting, with tiresome frequency, that I restart. OK, then, laptop: I will. I really will.