Mmm, sleep. Last night being the first and only night this week that Matt and I didn't have something planned, I went to bed early. And I mean early. Nine o'clock, or only shortly thereafter. And I was considering going up earlier, just because I wasn't doing much of anything else.

But instead I read the second-to-last tale in Arabian Nights.

Whether the extra sleep will do me any good today remains to be seen, of course. I hope so; I'm going over to K.T.'s tonight so we can work on editing. I'll need to be relatively alert.

Though generally, I'm a little more awake in the evenings than during the day.

Enough of that. Could I possibly be any more boring? No, I didn't think so.

Arabian Nights continues to be (perhaps unintentionally) amusing. Here we have a young man who falls in love with another man's slave-girl, and his confidante and message-carrier, sworn to secrecy, who tells their tale to a band of robbers and thieves! Here we have another young man who swears a solemn oath to his dying father that he will take good care of his wife and never desert her, who after spending the entirety of his inheritance takes her to the slave market to pay his debts!

How could this fail to be funny?

Not to mention astonishingly lascivious. A vizier buys a slave girl for the king and keeps her in his house for a time. The vizier's son comes home one evening, drunk, and stumbles into the girl's room. Believing him to be the man for whom she was purchased, the girl raises no cry. When the vizier's wife hears the story from the maid the next day (after the son has left again) she goes to the girl and demands to know if they had sex. "Yes," says the girl, "but only three times."

Which is pretty funny, too.

I really need to get around to ordering the second book.

--Liz