November 22, 1992

ON a weekend when most people are taking it easy with family and friends, Marion Gibbons will leave her home in Rye, board a 42-foot sailboat and set off for a two-year trip around the world. Unless there is a major storm, the 47-year-old Ms. Gibbons, who just quit her job as a financial consultant at Merrill Lynch, and her 45-year-old sister, Pauline, who spends much of her time mountain climbing, will depart two or three days after Thanksgiving. They will be accompanied by a friend and will be joined in January, "wherever we are," by Pauline Gibbons's boyfriend, an auto mechanic who lives in Alaska. That leaves room for two more crew members -- and Ms. Gibbons is looking for volunteers.

JOE COOPER hasn't sold his beloved Corvette yet. But nine months after he was laid off from his $46,000-a-year job as a computer network manager at a Citicorp mortgage-processing center in St. Louis, he no longer sounds like the cocky middle manager he used to be. He has blown through $17,000 in savings, and in the take-it-or-leave-it job market of the 1990's, he blew one good chance when he told a prospective employer that he wanted a company car. Gloria Walsh was let go in 1990 after 23 years as an advertising promotions manager when British Airways trimmed its ranks in New York. The really hard part begins next month: her severance pay and company-provided health coverage run out. But after 60 job interviews, she is still the odd woman out in the game of executive musical chairs. "It's more difficult the higher you go," she said. It's also more tortuous. One company has called her in time and time again for follow-up interviews. It "is still trying to find the perfect, perfect, perfect person," she said.

TWO years after everybody hoped unification had solved the "German problem," it is back again. With Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Government apparently overwhelmed by the challenges of simultaneously bringing the two parts of Germany together and coping with the chaotic social and economic consequences of the collapse of Communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe, neo-Nazi violence against foreigners has frightened Germans and their European neighbors who hoped such ugliness could never happen again.

More than four months away from the hasty construction of a victory stand on a Monday night in New Orleans, the earliest signs of a celebration seem to be taking place. The University of Michigan Wolverines appeared Thursday night in a game against the Russian national basketball team at the Palace of Auburn Hills. The glorified scrimmage attracted 19,229 customers, some of whom had to search for parking spots until halftime. Everyone seemed happy just to get a glimpse of the Fab Five as sophomores and eager to write in their young heroes for nothing less than a spot in the Final Four.

IF the American public was beside itself with grief over the demise of Superman last week, the sorrow was not conspicuous. In death, the Man of Steel was reduced to the same clammy, mercantile status as such other extinct American icons as Moxie, the Packard and the 45 R.P.M. record: he became a collectible. The teen-agers who lined up at the nation's newsstands and comic book stores on Wednesday had dollar signs, not tears, in their eyes. The issue of Superman in which the superhero from Krypton is killed by Doomsday, a villainous escapee from a cosmic insane asylum, was bound to be worth more than its face value of $1.25 someday. Or so its publishers would have young consumers believe. Superman may come back to life in some form or other in any event. The DC Comics people are only guaranteeing that he will stay dead until March 1993. But will anyone care about a resurrection, should there be one? Superman was a goner long before Doomsday arrived, as was the heroic ideal ("very phallic, glossy, gleamingly hard-edged, hyper-masculine" in the words of the writer Camille Paglia) he symbolized in American culture.