Today I work in a bagel shop.

Would that I were kidding, though I like bagels.

It happened like this. Last week I went in to the nearby bagel store annex (put in to service one of the many new luxe highrise loftstyle apartments this town has recently cultivated, also the courthouse). It was kind of busy and while I was waiting for my bagel the manager (you could tell cause he was older than everybody else) kept making little jokes. "You can tell she's starving; she's on her last leg!" I was standing on one leg, with the other sort of propped out at an angle, so I thought this was a little bit funny, and I smiled at him.

Then my bagel was done and he was ringing me up. "Course if you wanted employment, you could work here too!" he said randomly to me, as if kidding.

"Are you really hiring? Cause I am kind of looking," I said.

"We really are. Let's come sit down!"

And he fixed me up with a couple of short shifts during the week.

"So I'll see you next week, then," he concluded.

"Don't you want to know my name?"

I prefer jobs like this, the kind that just come to me and curl up in my lap, purring. Applying for jobs is so disheartening.

But it means I have to work at the bagel shop, then drive my drive to the class in Midwest Metropole, to teach the freaking-out kids about the SAT. Which means, by way of revealing the point, that I will unfortunately not have time to blog on any of the food-related topics I'd like, or about meeting with my director yesterday, or my in-progress post called "That, that tingling in my left thumb -- is that an orgasm?" OR about any of the many issues raised on all the other blogs. Today I like bankruptcy and debt: I'd like to talk about that.

Everyone's freaking out about the SAT, incidentally. It's new, now, you know. On Saturday, the new test will be administered for the first time... and the kids, they aren't doing so good. It's a hard test got harder.