How are you doing?

I only hear that question three, maybe four times a day now.

It's been just over a week since I was told I was being job eliminated – that I was out, done, kaput. So the temptation to say, "How the [bleep] do you think I'm feeling?!" has subsided a bit, along with the pang that lodged itself in the depths of my gut the very moment last week when my boss walked into the room with the head of HR.

This cannot be good, I thought to myself. It wasn't.

Despite last week's roller coaster on Wall Street, there's no doubt in the minds of most smart people who study the economy that things are getting better. The number of job creations is up and this year's crop of graduates is already reporting a much higher employment rate than the Class of 2009. We're still nowhere near where we were in, say, the good old days of 2005, but we're not in deep trouble either.