What was going on when I was born?

LAST January, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation issued a statement saying that its directors had approved the sale of $200 million worth of long-term bonds. The proceeds, it said, would be used to pay off short-term debt. ''Market conditions will dictate when Westinghouse will make the offer,'' the company explained. Today, four months later, the right market conditions have not yet materialized. Westinghouse is still stuck with its short-term debt and is still waiting, along with hundreds of other corporations, for that golden day when long-term rates decline a point or so from the current level of nearly 13 percent on 10-year bonds with fixed rates. Altogether, American companies have registered more than $50 billion in bonds that they intend to sell as soon as that rate ''window'' appears.

Hubie Brooks extended his hitting streak to 20 games yesterday with a seventh-inning home run that ignited a two-run rally and led to a second straight 2-1 victory for the Mets over the Los Angeles Dodgers at Shea Stadium. The victory followed the Mets' most popular script this season. Twelve of their 22 victories have been comebacks, with the tying or winning run scored in the seventh inning or later eight times. ''Right now I'm swinging the bat well,'' said Brooks. ''I feel comfortable and things are falling into place. But if I didn't have the streak, I'd feel the same. There's no extra weight on my back yet.''

DAN QUISENBERRY, who every year gains nearly as many saves as he does strikeouts, has heard all of the jokes about his style of pitching. ''In 1980,'' he recalled, ''there was the 30-30-30 club: 30 saves, 30 strikeouts, 30 great plays.'' He even makes some at his own expense. ''I'm probably the only relief pitcher,'' he said recently, ''who has more saves thanstrikeouts. But recently I had a couple of 0-2 counts.'' Though he has become baseball's best relief pitcher, Quisenberry clearly pitches out of the mainstream of classic late-inning relief. He gets outs quietly with a steady stream of ground balls instead of blowing batters away explosively with strikeouts. That doesn't mean he is dissatisfied with the style of his accomplishments, but somewhere deep inside there lurks a part of him that once - maybe twice, if it's not asking too much? - would like to throw a baseball at a speed of 98 miles an hour. Asked the other day whether he would choose to throw the way he does or the way Rich Gossage and Lee Smith do, he said, ''I sure would be tempted to take the fastball, to take the ability to throw the ball by hitters.'' Then he recalled a moment from the 1982 All-Star Game that he called ''one of the highlights of my career.''

An elliptical office tower - Manhattan's first, according to its architects, Philip Johnson and John Burgee - has begun to rise on the east side of Third Avenue between 53d and 54th Streets in a setting of recently erected rectangular office towers. Indeed, that unusual oval shape was chosen, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee say, to distinguish the new building from the dominant form of its neighbors, including the Citicorp Center directly across the avenue.

If anyone wants to feel buoyant about the just concluded 1983-84 theater season, he should proceed directly to the corner of Broadway and 45th Street, walk a few steps west to Shubert Alley and then gaze at the dazzling marquees which snap into view. The first belongs to the Booth Theater, home of the new Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine show about Georges Seurat, ''Sunday in the Park With George.'' This work is a rarity in any season: a musical unlike any Broadway has seen before. Right next door, at the Plymouth, is Tom Stoppard's ''The Real Thing'' - a play in which a playwright learns how to fall in love even as he learns how to write a play about falling in love. It's not only the most tender work yet by one of England's smartest writers, but also an example of Broadway acting, design and direction at their most assured. Keep going and you'll land at David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning ''Glengarry Glen Ross,'' a boiling-hot comedy about the daily deaths of Chicago real-estate salesmen, delivered in a startling verbal fusillade worthy of Chicago's St. Valentine Day's massacre.

The first commercial products to be made in space are to go on sale later this year. They are perfect plastic spheres, each exactly one one-hundred-thousandth of an inch in diameter, that were produced in weightlessness on a recent space shuttle flight and will be sold to laboratories for use in calibrating microscopes and other instruments. An engineer for a private company, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, is set to fly on the next shuttle mission in late June to operate a machine that could lead to moneymaking drug-processing ventures in space. First Tentative Steps These are among the first tentative steps being taken by the Government and American businesses to see if there is money to be made in space. More than 350 companies are exploring the prospects for manufacturing products that can be made only in weightlessnes and for running private transportation services into space.

The word ''ballerina'' is used so often and so carelessly that it can refer to anyone from a moppet in a tutu at a dancing school recital to the star of a professional ballet company. But the designation ought to be reserved for someone who is not only a principal dancer of a company, but also an artist of international stature. One dancer who would surely qualify for such an honorific title is Cynthia Gregory of American Ballet Theater, which is now in the midst of its season at the Metropolitan Opera House. Because of her background, the Los Angeles-born dancer is a uniquely American ballerina. And in a recent interview she appeared to be concerned with just what it is that makes American dancers special. Miss Gregory believes that American dancers are exposed to what she calls ''a real conglomeration of styles.'' A member of Ballet Theater since 1965, her own repertory includes such ballets as ''Swan Lake,'' ''La Sylphide,'' ''Coppelia,'' ''Carmen'' and ''Miss Julie.'' And she stars in two very different works that entered the company's repertory this year: the ''Cinderella'' choreographed by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Peter Anastos and Twyla Tharp's quirky ''Bach Partita.''

THE court documents read like a Hollywood potboiler. An influential reporter for one of the nation's most prestigious newspapers -- The Wall Street Journal -- is accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of profiting from information ''misappropriated'' from his employer. The S.E.C. complaint filed this month weaves a tale of intrigue involving wealthy accomplices, a Swiss bank account and false invoices -- charges that have made the actions of the reporter, R. Foster Winans, a matter of scrutiny in both financial and journalistic circles. The Winans action, more stunning than routine S.E.C. filings, is the latest in a string of dramatic cases flowing from the agency's attempt to stretch the definition of illegal insider trading into new and uncharted terrain. Insider trading has in fact become the hallmark of the tenure of John S.R. Shad, the 60-year-old former vice chairman of E.F. Hutton, who became the nation's 22d S.E.C. chairman in 1981. At the outset, Mr. Shad promised to ''comedown on insider trading with hobnail boots.'' And he has. Of the 77 insider trading actions brought by the S.E.C. since 1949, a total of 55 were brought under Mr. Shad. These cases are notable not only because of sheer volume, but because they contain the seeds of a major broadening in the meaning of insider trading that could influence behavior on Wall Street and its tributaries for years to come.

The drama of the Yankee game today was not obvious. It was internal, felt severely by Ray Fontenot. ''I'm no dummy,'' he said. ''I knew my job was on the line.'' Fontenot pitched into the ninth inning, and the Yankees defeated the A's, 8-4. He allowed 6 hits and was supported by 13 hits from his team. It was his first victory of the season, against four losses.

MORE than once, Earl Williams, a New Haven lawyer, has left the courtroom shaking his head and muttering under his breath. He would have liked to give the judge a piece of his mind, he says. Now Mr. Williams and Connecticut's other trial lawyers will get that chance. Beginning this summer, the state's Judicial Department will ask them to judge the judges, as part of a new program to evaluate Connecticut's 125 Superior Court judges.

Two Manhattan landlords were indicted recently on charges that they hired a gang of thugs and thieves to oust tenants by strong-arm tactics from 330 apartments so they could rent or sell the apartments more profitably. The landlords, who have pleaded not guilty, face up to 15 years in jail if they are convicted, according to Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney. Such criminal-harassment cases are rare, but there are thousands of lesser complaints of landlords trying to dislodge tenants with such forms of harassment as squirting glue into front- door locks, withholding services, refusing to make repairs, charging exorbitant late- rent fees and repeatedly suing tenants on frivolous grounds. For their part, landlords say that they, too, are harassed by tenants who withhold rent without legal justification, break appliances to make a case for not paying their rent; scratch graffitti on elevator walls; use delaying tactics to stop cooperative conversions and deny access to apartments for emergency repairs. In recent years, the word ''harassment'' (which derives from the Old French verb harer , meaning ''to set a dog on'') has been so overused and its meaning so blurred that it has become a general reference to any form of unpleasantness between landlords and tenants.

They all decided to meet at Parnassus, the new coffee house in the sky, and talk over their mutual concern: musical composition. As you can imagine, it turned into a heated session, what with Beethoven getting on everyone's nerves by pretending not to hear what they were saying and Wagner insisting on having his wife Cosima take down everything he said for use in memoirs, diaries and publicity releases. Mozart did not help much, either, by giggling uncontrollably when Brahms set his beard afire trying to light a cigar.