This is really happening, isn't it?

My student visa arrived in the mail today, and I've sent the last tuition check, and yeah, I'm really going to Italy. I don't know why I'm having such a hard time believing it. It's just been such a distant dream for so long that, even though I've spent a long time working to make it happen, the idea that it actually would happen seemed less fact than faith.

The first time I even thought of doing something like this was when I first studied with 500 Clown--so, fall 2003? I remember Paul talking about the year he spent at Dell'Arte as a gift to himself. And I understood it logically then, but now--I'm as surprised and delighted as if I'd just opened a fantastic present.

Can't really linger over this post because there's so much to do: the car to clean out and sell, the Italian to study. I think I have a pretty solid hold on the past tenses now. I love that Italian has a sort of plupluperfect, the trapassato remoto, for events occurring before the events in the pluperfect, the trapassato prossimo. It does make you understand the poetic appeal of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, however wobbly the science: in Italy you're not just a woman with a past; you can be a woman with a remote past, an immediate past, an imperfect past, an absolute past.

I should go work on the future tenses, and that's not just metaphor.