y eighth grade Social Studies teacher was a chubby, crabby old coot with an endless supply of drab brown ties and a wicked Cheshire-cat grin. He delighted in tormenting us as he handed back tests. “You feel lucky?” he might ask, tossing a scantron face-down. Then, cocking a bushy gray eyebrow, “Remember: There’s two kinds of luck.”

As a rule, I consider myself aligned with the good kind of luck—the one that includes straight teeth, loving parents, and occasional trips paid for by someone else. I have skated through life with trace amounts of real hardship, and perhaps that’s why it’s so startling when good luck’s counterpart makes a visit, as it did recently, hitting me on the head. I mean, seriously—hitting me on the head.

It began Saturday afternoon, when I decided my bathroom needed some touch-ups, and I attacked it armed with a tall ladder, a hammer and nails, a pint of orange paint, and precious little elbow room. All afternoon, I climbed up and down that ladder with the happy hum of someone turning their idle hours into a productive endeavor. At some point, a splatter of orange appeared on the floor, and I stooped underneath the ladder to wipe it up. That’s when bad luck hit me—in the form of a hammer dropping onto my skull.

I felt a bit like Chicken Little—at first, I thought the world had fallen and then, absurdly, a very large nail. It took a moment to realize a hammer had landed square on my noggin. My vision tilted and swirled, and I rushed to the kitchen for an ice pack. My happy hum was replaced by a vague desire to vomit, a knot on my skull, and a dozen orange handprints across my apartment, stubborn as hell to get out. In the end, I was fine. But I wondered: Imagine if I hadn’t bought the wussy lady hammer!

My bad luck persisted, though. That night I had tickets to a Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, and despite leaving my apartment with oodles of time, a subway shut-down and a confused cabbie brought me within minutes of missing the whole spectacle. I ran four blocks in heels just to make it on time. I was so overzealous that I actually jogged past my companions who, enjoying a casual drink in the bar as they waited, stared at each other as I blurred past: “That running person looked an awful lot like Sarah, didn’t it?”

In the end, good luck conquered all: I made it on time, and the show was magnificent. (More on that to come, perhaps, tomorrow.) But it wasn’t two days later that my laptop died. It died in the middle of the afternoon, without warning: The laptop’s plug sparked magnificently and, then, the computer was no more. You might as well have hit me on the head with a hammer—that was my emotional response, anyway.

And so, for three days, I have lived in agonizing limbo. I will not begin to describe to you what losing the laptop would mean—the stories it holds, the history, the pictures that cannot be found anywhere else. I had no time for such nostalgia: I have deadlines to make. So I took the train for an hour up to Washington Heights, where my dear friends Lisa and Craig let me use their computer, and I completed every day’s assignment with the nagging suspicion I had forgotten something. When my laptop died, a little part of me died as well. It was called, “My to-do list.”

You can imagine my surprise when I arrived home today—having spoken to Dell Computer not 24 hours ago—to find the exact plug I needed to get my laptop back up and running. (They told me it would take a day, maybe three. God love you, Michael Dell.) And you can imagine my excitement when the plug they sent made my computer run again. It has been a long, hard week without proper email or the ability to blog. But I have it back now. And that is luck—sweet, blessed luck--as far as I can tell. The good kind, and that’s how I’d like to keep it.