Very many much

There are very many things occurring in my head and around me. I'm not sure where to begin or what to say. Coolest, maybe, is that I discovered my poem published on the International Museum of Women was translated into Arabic. My mother was delighted and claims she will carefully read through and make sure that I have been accurately represented in her tongue. My own study of Arabic has been going slowly but steadily, but I'm not so far along that it would be something I could take on myself with any sort of efficiency. Something else that's pretty exciting, if not a little nervous-making for me, is that this Thursday at 7:30 a couple of compatriots and I will be staging the very first funny/sexy/sad reading at the cafe I frequent on a corner close to my house. Check us out on myspace. Become our friend! This weekend has been uber-busy; I've done most of my Arabic homework (a task more difficult each week), finished a major revision on a key story in the collection I'll be turning in for my MA culminating project this spring, written my first review for Kirkus Discoveries, and gotten through a good chunk of The Life of Henry Brulard. This reading is for a course on autobiography that I've just begun, the last course of my MA, and I must say I am much intrigued by the things that Stendhal demonstrates, through the amusing and careless listing of the major events of his life that stick out in his memory, a few truths about the reality of memory, as well as the fundamental influence of sex and the sexual on the development of a human psyche. (Boy, that was a long sentence! Now I'll give you a short one:) Spoiled brat that he seems to have been. And now I'm trying to slog through a particularly theoretic article by Paul DeMan, tracing the development and conception of allegory and symbol and irony in European literature. I knew there was a reason I went back to school to focus on writing instead of lit. There's so much more but I've got to go. I'm having dinner at a friend's house. There will be mussels gathered today at a beach south of here, and mushrooms foraged from, among other places such as highway medians, Golden Gate Park. I'm not bragging or anything. Okay, maybe I am. Oh, and my favorite quote from Stendhal:

"The fact is I have no company in the evenings to distract me from my thoughts of the morning."
A distinction nicely drawn, no?