--Lilah, on Angel.

In my last entry, I noted that I'd made plans to meet Sibley on Sunday, but that they'd been thrown for a loop by the discovery that I had an unveiling to attend on the same day. It turns out that I didn't know the half of it. On Thursday night, I discovered that my nephew's bris (circumcision) was called for the same day.

(Usually, the timing of a bris isn't a surprise; it takes place when the boy is eight days old, inclusive, a week after he's born. But it gets more complicated with kids born prematurely, as was the case here; generally, it takes places a week after he comes home from the hospital, but apparently there's some leeway there.)

I discovered this during a phone call to my sister, in which I was asking her for details on the unveiling. "It'll be after the bris," she said. "The bris is on Sunday?" I said. "Nobody told you?" she said. I couldn't respond; I spent the next thirty seconds laughing hysterically. It just figured.

Anyway, after that, I called my uncle, got details on both events and made tentative arrangements to be driven to them by him, hung up, and proceeded to lose it again, laughing for about a minute this time.

Shortly after 2 PM, when class was over, I called the professor at her office and confirmed that she'd be on campus until 4 PM, which became my new deadline. By 3:30 or so, I'd managed to end up with something. I wrote the last page while the first few were printing, it was kinda messy, and it was a page short of the required ten, but, well, it was what it was, and I was out of time. So off to college I went, arriving just a bit after four, and catching my professor just when she was about to leave to the library.

So I took out the essay, but offered a disclaimer. "For the sake of my self-esteem, I just want to say up front that this essay is complete, absolute, unmitigated, entirely, without question, crap. It is being turned in strictly on the theory that anything is better than nothing, and, frankly, that theory is being stretched to the limit here," said I, in utter sincerity.

"So I shouldn't feel prejudiced when grading this?" she said. "Oh, not in the least," I replied.

"Would you like a little more time," she asked, "or would you rather just be done with it?"

"More time is an option?" I said.

"Well, yes; I'd rather you take a bit longer and write something you'll be happy with, than have you turn in something right now that you don't like at all."

"In that case," I said, yanking the sheaf of papers back off her desk, "I think I'll take you up on that."

So I have until this Friday. She's looked over the first draft, and liked most of the stuff in the middle, but the introduction and conclusion have to go, and the whole thing needs to be restructured, and I have a bit more research to do.

(As for that, I have more than 25 books in my room related to this paper, and I read the relevant portions of all of them prior to writing the first draft. In one case, that meant reading it from cover to cover, but in most cases, there were just a few pages on Pygmalion. Getting them all back to the library is going to require a couple of trips.)

...which brings us to Sunday. And Monday. And Tuesday. But I'm fading fast, and really ought to go to sleep. So all of that will have to wait for the next entry. Tomorrow, with any luck. Stay tuned.