--Chamfort

As mentioned in the previous entry, I was up 'till well past 5 AM writing it. I then kept finding minor typos and such, which kept me occupied beyond 6. This was not a Good Thing, to put it mildly.

See, it's like this. My weekly camp newspaper gets distributed every Friday. Which means that it has to be done earlier in the week. How much earlier has varied over time. In summers past, I've generally started out finishing the thing by Wednesday evening, and then gradually drifted later and later, until, by the end of the summer, I was getting done on Thursday night.

This summer, owing to a combination of an unusual camp schedule and jury duty, my first issue got written on a Thursday, and the pattern continued from there. Until now.

Thursday is Tisha B'Av, or the Ninth of Av, with "Av" being a month on the Jewish calendar. The culmination of a three-week period of mourning, it's the darkest date on the Jewish calendar, it being the day when both Temples were destroyed (separated by several hundred years). It's also the anniversary of a long list of unpleasant events, of which perhaps the most notable is that, in 1492, it was the deadline imposed by the Spanish Inquisition by which Jews had to leave Spain, convert, or die.

Observance of Tisha B'Av includes abstention from food, drink, sex, washing oneself, and wearing leather shoes, plus the recitation of a great many laments (spanning Jewish history from the Temple era to the Holocaust, with the Crusades being featured prominently along the way). Not exactly a fun day, you'll have gathered, and not really an appropriate time to be writing a comedic newsletter. And so I resolved to finish the thing early this time around, getting the whole thing out of the way by Wednesday afternoon. Which meant that, ideally, I wanted to write most of it today.

So I took the buses back to my apartment, getting about 45 minutes' worth of being half-asleep along the way, and got into bed, and, inevitably, the phone rang.

'Twas a camper with an article for me, who lives in my neighborhood, and wanted to know when he could stop by with it. I tried asking him to just put it in my mailslot, but he would have none of that; he needed to discuss it with me. He counteroffered seeing me in camp the next day, but as I didn't expect to be in camp, that wasn't an option. So I grudgingly agreed that he could stop by in a few minutes.

In the meantime, I remembered that I was supposed to call another camper, who's also written for me in the past, so I did, which turned out to be a good thing, because he had a good idea for a contest. So we talked for a while, with a short break while the other kid showed up, gave me his article, told me what to do with it, and left.

By this time, of course, I was no longer able to sleep.

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite up to writing, either.

I finally met the Sandman somewhere around 3 AM, I think, not having written a word of the paper.