and yet it was just sort of fitting, given how the rest of day had gone up to that point

It's been such a weird day, and then at 4:18 work buddy N wheeled her chair over and whispered: Heath Ledger is dead!

What? I said, and then I say what I always do when someone tells me a relatively young celebrity has died, mostly for lack of anything better to say besides "how": Shut up!

And then I heard everyone on my side of the building whispering, and the loud bitchy girls on the other side of the building: Oh my god! But he was so hot! Hot guys shouldn't die! Because hot people never die. And because these girls crack each other up all day long saying shit like that, and it makes me remember why I really hated most of my fellow Comm Studies majors back in the day and preferred the stinky English ones, because most of them had some heart, at least, if not a cigarette to bum.

And there it was: the last twelve minutes of the day buzzing with the news that no one we'd ever met was dead, and I sort of felt sad, and stupid for really acting like I could understand, and the expected sort of dumb you feel when something like this gets national attention while somewhere else in the city/state/country/world millions of people are dying, and have been. But mostly like it was really just time to go home and figure out, once and for all, what the entire point of January actually is.