tororo

i myself am waiting for a really special occasion to use the chicken smiley. i'm sure i'll need it some day

as for firecrackers and swimming pools, the pool got cut from the film and the firecrackers these cool strobe-y things that silhouette characters at night. but i was just the lighting girl, so i didn't really get to play with them.

also, italo calvino rocks

I think you're right, but I really won't have any way of knowing short of posting a Private Eye at the corner, & that's just a little obsessive.

you've expressed from time to time uncertainty about your English, but I have to say you can put a sentence together better than perhaps 90% of the people I know for whom English is the only language they know, or are ever likely to know (especially now that the widespread use of the internet, instant messaging & what-not has evolved--or devolved--communication in English into what often seems like strings of acronyms & stock phrases used badly)

&, for me, your writing often has that slightly exotic tinge that I admire in Dinesen, Joseph Conrad, & Vladimir Nabokov, among others.

--rats