3:27 a.m. I've been thinking a lot about stocking up for Y2K. Laugh, if you must. Go ahead. I didn't say I was actually going to do it -- but I am going to think about it.

I was thinking about it the other night when I was in the market. We have many, many markets within a small radius of our home, and the markets themselves are of wildly different moods and atmospheres.

The market in this picture is the "poor" market in a somewhat rough part of town. Here you will find all manner of Spanish and Mexican foods, really sweet baked goods, nice fattening but tasty potato logs, stuffed jalapenos, bar-b-qed chicken under the heat lamps, and little to no Wolfgang Puck.

There are only basic fruits and veggies, but there is a huge amount of cleaning equipment in these aisles, and a ratio of about one white-ish person to every three brownish people. And look! Here are three of them now: baby Kimberly, sister Vanessa, and their granny, whose name I couldn't pronounce.

What could be more beautiful than a baby? Could it be a little girl, bundled against the air-conditioning, or would it be the buffed-up face of Lisa Kudrow on the cover of InStyle that you can see in the background? You can guess who's actually getting paid just for being beautiful. Anything wrong with that?

And if there is widespread panic and looting and misery in a mere 17 days? You can bet that Lisa will be safe. And these two beautiful brownish girls? And their mother, who was signing two paychecks at once to pay for the jugs of milk in her cart? And her mother, who was holding the 15-day-old baby in the bright glare of a foreign country's super abundance without benefit of a single word of English? Who knows? Who really cares?

Here are my plans, so far: I have collected each and every empty jug from all the milk we have consumed this past year. I have approximately 52 of them stashed here and there in the house. I will fill them on Dec. 31st. Maybe. I still can't imagine myself doing something so ... so ... un-American. So negative and paranoid.

Stay tuned.

For the same reason, I really don't want to buy too much of anything -- too many batteries or rolls of toilet paper or cans of soup -- because I don't want to look greedy or nervous or grabby or anything less than one hundred per cent optimistic.

But I'm still worrying. In the course of this past year, ever since I started worrying last January, I've looked at our market shelves with increasing awe and wonder. How have we come to have so many cereals? So many flavors and blends and brands of cranberry juice? So much yogurt and individually packaged cheeses and tiny little tubs of shrimp salad?

Such abundance. It's a beautiful thing to see. I would really miss it if it were all grabbed away and trampled underfoot. I hope the lights don't go out and the water supply continues to flow pure and untainted into our sinks.

I hope we're all going to be laughing about this in 18 days and worrying about who's going to be over-styled on the cover of the next huge issue of InStyle. I hope no programmer has fallen asleep over any code.

It would be nice if one or two utility bills got permanently lost in the zeros ... but really, I'm only kidding. I don't want to push our luck.