Time to fast away the old year passes and hail the new, lads and lasses.

But before moving on to 2002, there's a lot of frantic preparation in store for tonight's feast. Lamb and chicken tagines to top off with honey and orange blossom water, coriander potato cakes to fry, merguëz sausages to wrap in pastry and bake, couscous salad with melon, black beans, rucola and chevre to prepare, chocolate truffles to roll. We're off to A.'s apartment to help get everything ready. Happy Moroccan New Year.

The Swedish phrase for the day is god fortsättning. It means happy new year, more or less.

- by Francis S.

A conspiracy is afoot and I smell a rat. I mean, a cat. Two of them to be precise, brought over by A. the ex-model and her boyfriend the photographer who came to dinner last night.

You see, the husband has been hot to get a cat for well on a year now. Me, my parents were raised on farms where animals belonged outside. We had a dog once when I was a little boy, but I think my parents have passed on to me their general indifference when it comes to pets.

Not that I'm immune to the charms of a cat. When I lived in Barcelona, my flatmate had a scrawny little cat, Pepa, who seemed to think I was her knight in less-than-shining armor, come to save her from the dreariness of her life in a cold Spanish apartment with an undeniably crazy owner (well, crazy but lovable). From the first day I arrived, Pepa slept most of the night with me, getting up early in the morning to go sleep with her owner, E., but then returning after an hour or so. And when she slept, she had to be touching me, even if it was just the very tip of her paw.

As for the current conspiracy, I think the husband connived with A. in order to show me how awfully nice it would be to have cats running around our own apartment, curiouser and curiouser as they padded and sniffed their way through everything, or curling up next to us on the sofa as we drank red wine and smoked cigarettes and yammered on about the Moroccan food planned for the new year's party at A. and her boyfriend's apartment. (They went home at 1: 00 or so, cats and all.)

In fact, the idea of having cats at home did rather grow on me, although I'm not a big one for changing litter or vacuuming cat hair, and I definitely am not very tolerant when it comes to nasty little kitty claws ripping apart dining room chairs.

Still, I suppose I should be happy that a cat or two didn't appear under the Christmas tree this year.

The Swedish word for the day is lurad. It means tricked.

- by Francis S.

I moved to Sweden three years ago this very day.

The time has raced by at rocket speed.

At I.'s dinner party last night, the English mathematician living in Germany - he's lived there for 14 years - said to me, "you don't miss home yet, do you."

He was right, I haven't every really missed the States. And I'd always figured that if I don't miss it by now, I'll never miss it.

But maybe I've been wrong.

"I wonder if part of my being happy has to do with not knowing the language, that when I really start to use Swedish relatively exclusively, I'll lose part of myself," I said to him.

"Oh, no," he replied. "It makes you hold on to the language even more."

Which didn't really answer the question I was asking, which was not about losing the language but about losing myself. But the subject changed when someone asked another question, and I never ended up probing deeper into it.

- by Francis S., faux philosopher

Last night we had dinner at the apartment of I., the sister of A.'s boyfriend, the photographer (how's that for a tortured line of possessives? Can you figure out who is related to who?).

I. has a new boyfriend, an Englishman living in Germany who works for a big German publishing company. He seemed curiously young - I suspect though he's 50 or so, he's never been married - and charmingly broke numerous Swedish rules of etiquette: not standing properly in line to get his food at the buffet table, not paying attention to the various toasts, talking over people and talking too much, not formally saying goodbye to everyone as they left in a slow trickle.

He is a mathemetician and believes that at some point it will be possible to reduce our selves to some kind of code or equation that could be looked at or stopped at any given millisecond, and that this code or equation is uniquely us and exists forever and is our soul.

I understood, I think, his reduction of our selves, but I wonder.

"Do you believe that our souls are something more than this?" I asked.

Being a mathemetician, he seemed to believe that such a code is wonder enough to fit his definition of a soul, because it is unique and because it exists forever.

I find it unsatisfying to be at heart an equation and very humanly wish my soul to be something much more.

The Swedish word for the day is Gud. It means God.

- by Francis S.

Any Stockholmer worth her or his salt loves Sweden best in summertime, when the sun never quite sets, when ferry rides through the rocky but green islands of the Stockholm archipelago are lit with gold.

Me, I love it best now, when the sky is dim and grey, and all the old yellow buildings of Stockholm are frosted with a layer of snow that just keeps getting thicker and thicker, and lights twinkle and bank and flame behind windows under the snow, candles and Christmas stars and kitchen lights.

It is the romantic perfect winter of my imagination, and it is glorious when the train stops mid-ride over the icy black water between Gamla Stan and Södermalm, and on one side are the old buildings of Kornhamnstorg, a huge Christmas tree with plain white lights in the middle of the square, and on the other side are the bluffs of Södermalm, capped with twinkling towers and church steeples and cupolas.

- by Francis S.

The two-sentence review of "Fellowship of the Ring":

Don't you just hate it when despite having great material to work with, i.e. actors and fabulous natural (if a bit too computer-enhanced) scenery, a director is still reduced to telling you what to feel by laying on the music thick and heavy, and worse, music by enya - enya for chrissakes!!!!! Although to be fair, maybe it has something to do with trying to take a sprawling and unwieldy book and forcing it into the shape of a movie - to paraphrase one of Ian Holm's lines in the movie, ''it feels like too little butter spread over too much bread.''

I know I sound like some kind of heretic criticizing the film, but I didn't like it much.

The Swedish word for the day is besviken. It means disappointed.

- by Francis S.

Christmas hasn't been a disappointment or a frustration this year. I coasted just enough on the residual thrill from my childhood that the season still imparts without expecting too much from it. There was a moment of longing to be with my parents and brothers and sister, an instinctual longing to relive those Christmases of my childhood that cannot possibly be relived, but it passed quickly.

And the Swedish Christmas celebration was more pleasing than I remember it. The present-giving, the watching of Kalle Anka - Donald Duck - on television (which the whole of Sweden watches at 3:00 p.m. on Christmas eve... a relatively new tradition carried on from the days when there was only one television channel, state-run of course, and the Disney movies weren't shown in Sweden for some reason, or so I am told) and the food. I suppose all that cold fish is beginning to grow on me.

- by Francis S.

Christmas on the Plains

a very short story by Francis Strand

He had the generosity of the unfaithful, whispering over the phone, promising endlessly that he would be there.

"Yes," he said.

He leaned into the phone, his eyes hungry, his lips opening and closing, hanging onto the cigarette as if to a rosary.

"Yes, I promise," he sighed.

He was not listening, but instead hearing only the children singing as if down to dirty shepherds, singing from high above and behind a scrim. Children who were really just on the radio.

He had decided a week earlier that he most certainly would go, no matter the difficulties it posed for him. But as soon as he promised, he knew it was impossible.

* * *

When the family sat down to eat, they wished that he hadn't come home after all. It was awkward, and he was pointedly answering questions they hadn't even thought to ask. Questions they would never have imagined could have the answers he was giving them. He insisted on smoking even as they ate.

"Shall we open the presents now?" the mother managed to interject finally.

He nodded, and they all stood up. She pulled a clean cloth from the kitchen drawer and covered the meal they had barely touched in their astonishment and discomfort, covered it with a white cloth until they would come back to finish the sweet potatoes, the stuffing, the oily green olives, after the tumult of the presents.

"Shall we?"

And they all walked numbly into the front parlor, the tree suddenly pathetic, the tinsel and lights and glass balls an insult to its dying there in front of them.

* * *

"Hark," they sang, "the herald angels-"

And although they prided themselves on the simple fact that they were a musical family, it was all most of them could do to pull their own part, whether soprano, alto or bass. Except him, of course. He couldn't sing a note.

They didn't even bother to join hands around the tree.

"I'm so tired," the mother said, and they all agreed.

Carolyn, the oldest, sat up with him long after the rest of the family had gone to bed, and they drank first one scotch and water, and then another, and another, as he lied to her about this and that. He knew she didn't believe a word, would never believe a word he said, but he couldn't stop himself.

* * *

After they had all gone back, back to their own homes, it all seemed so bleak to the mother, who loved the holidays with such desperation, who worked so hard to make it a pleasure for everyone. As she broke down and wept, she thought her heart would break, and she could not console herself.

- copyright 2001 Francis Strand

p.s. The Swedish word phrase for the day is en riktig god jul. It means a very merry Christmas.

How appropriate that Peter, proprieter of secret kings, one of the first blogs I started reading regularly, should be visitor number 3,000 at this site. And, believe it or not Aaron, Sacramento's famous 8-legged dj, is yet again almost the 3000th visitor for at least the second time in his life (you were 3001, Aaron).

The Swedish word for the day is pristagare. It means prize winner, of which there are none today, unfortunately, because I have no prizes to hand out. I'm rotten when it comes to prizes and presents (in fact, I should be out Christmas shopping this very minute).

- by Francis S.

"Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion" was on ZTV here in Sweden last night, and I'd forgotten the whole "I'm the Mary and you're the Rhoda" shtick, which I really relate to, and which probably really dates me.

I remember watching that show every Saturday night - or was it Friday? - from the time I was about 9 years old until I was 14. By that time, the old Saturday-night lineup - first "All in the Family," then "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," then "The Bob Newhart Show" and finally "The Carol Burnett Show" - had lost its shine and the original "Saturday Night Live" had become the thing to watch, which I did as I babysat for the same family every Saturday, their strange children asleep in their beds upstairs and me downstairs leafing through The Joy of Sex, worried that the parents would come home and catch me drooling over the bad seventies-style drawings of not very attractive men with beards and/or long hair having sex with women who looked like Jane Fonda (in her "Klute" shag-hairstyle days) in a wide range of positions, from the prosaic to the obscure. (They also had a rather peculiar book that I remember quite well - Transcendental Meditation for Tiny Tots - all about warm fuzzies and cold pricklies and just as oh-so-seventies as The Joy of Sex, but much more confusing. Worse, when I tried to find a link for it, there was only one source listed, a scary Christian site entitled "Combat Tactics against Satanism and the Occult: Guerilla Warfare for Young Adults." I couldn't be bothered to read the 25-page article to find out exactly where they mention this obscure book from my adolescence.)

Me, I wouldn't exactly say I'm the Rhoda, but the husband is definitely the Mary in our relationship.

The Swedish word for the day is 70-talet. It means the '70s

- by Francis S.

The Swedes are not a skeptical people. They have an endearingly childlike willingness to participate. They believe in joining in on reindeer games.

Take an office party, just as an example. An office party could start off with everyone drinking vodka cocktails, followed by an office choir singing traditional Swedish and American Christmas carols. Then, everyone could sit down and a toastmaster would present the evening. Then two old guys from the office could get up and play electric guitars and sing songs about the company, but to the tune of "Alice's Restaurant." And everyone, but everyone happily joins in on the choruses, and starts to clap along.

If it were America, everyone would be looking around to see if anyone else was clapping. As for singing along, well, social singing is a lost art in America I fear.

But I digress. At this fictitious office party, everyone could then be asked to participate in a game wherein a table is brought out on which are set 60 presents, which is the same number of guests at the fictitious office party. They are then asked to play a game wherein they roll a die that is passed along the table (or in the case of this particular fictitious office party, there are six dice planted around the big u-shaped table at which everyone is sitting) and when they get a six, they may go up and pick a present, or if they have one already, they may exchange with someone who has a better-looking present.

I can't imagine the people at the public relations firm I worked at in the States playing this game.

The Swedes, however, love it. They are laughing and running and whooping and frantically grabbing presents all over the place. They dive into it with gusto.

Of course, at this fictitious party they do a lot of adult-type things as well, mainly, once the food and games are over, they push aside the tables and get drunk and dance under the twinkling Christmas lights strung up around the room, paper stars in the window, candles all around. This continues until 2 a.m., the winter's first storm raging outside and making everyone feel snug and safe and helping them forget they have to be at work early the next morning.

The only disappointing thing about the party is if they forget to sing "Hej, tomtegubbar," especially since it is about the only drinking song one knows.

The Swedish phrase for the day is att ha roligt. It means to have fun.

- by Francis S.

One of my favorite drinks is fläderblom saft. It sounds very Shakespearian in translation - elder flower juice - although it's not really juice, it's actually a drink made from water mixed with a syrup made of elder blossoms, lemon, sugar and probably a few other sundry items I'm not aware of.

It tastes rather like white grape juice, but with undertones I don't know how to describe: It reminds me of the juices I've drunk in fever dreams when I was a little boy. A strange, marvelous taste, slightly off but in a pleasing way.

I suppose I like it in great part because it is so terribly poetic - to drink flowers.

- by Francis S.

Laurel just asked why I find Swedish so difficult to learn, and how am I learning it.

I started responding then and there, but I realized the answer deserved more of a prominent spot in my little scheme of things here.

In typical Francis fashion, I start with the second question. So, Laurel, here is how I am learning Swedish:

First, I've taken three classes, of which the last one was an extra-intensive course over two weeks last summer. My last teacher was an excellent pedagogue - she normally teaches 10 year olds - and I not only learned a lot, I got over a major hurdle and became much more comfortable in conversation, although I have backslid over the last couple of months, to my great displeasure. But not enough displeasure to actually do something about it.

Of course I learn in other ways, too - watching the news and other television, reading the newspaper - Dagens Nyheter - I even read Det Osynliga Barnet (The Invisible Child), a book of children's stories by Tove Jansson, looking up every last damn word I didn't know.

But what makes it hard are three things: fear, pride and laziness.

Fear of sounding like a five-year-old child, of being misunderstood, of not being able to be myself with people - show my sense of humor, for instance. I fear losing myself somehow, and I fear misunderstanding other people. I fear that I am too old to be learning a second language.

The pride, well, I guess the fear and pride are more or less the same thing. I foolishly want my Swedish to be perfect, which it will never be. Oh, I am proud that I can pronounce the difficult sounds, the -sj- and -stj- and -sk- and -skj- properly, and my pure vowels and soft -r- don't give away that I am American. At least not most of the time. But it isn't nearly enough.

The laziness, well, it's easy to get along with English here, people always want to practice their English and in Stockholm, their English is overwhelmingly excellent (it's hard not to compare my Swedish to everyone's English, and the comparison is so unflattering on my part that it hurts). The language at my company is English, and I speak English at home with my husband, which isn't likely to change soon because it is our language, though we do have some embarrassing Swedish endearments that I'm not going to go into here. And, in fact, I think part of my charm to him is that I do speak English - it's part of what he loves about me.

It's not all pain and suffering and failure, though. I think what I need now is another conversation class, which I expect will get me past another hurdle and truly start to try and speak Swedish every chance I get. I've already begun the switch at work - half of my meetings are now in Swedish - and I expect that'll take another six months or so to feel truly comfortable with it at the office.

I just wish I weren't ashamed of it, that I didn't feel like it is a terrible shortcoming and a failure. And I wish I weren't so annoyingly full of self-pity.

So, there you have it. I'm sure I've forgotten something, and if I remember it, I'll be sure to let you know, don't you worry.

- by Francis S.

I went yesterday to finally see the Lucia program - children singing in a Lucia procession followed by a concert of songs appropriate to St. Lucia day and to Christmas - and I sat with my friend C., the photographer, on one side and a little old lady on the other side. I guess the little old lady heard me speaking in English with C., because at one point she turned to me and said in English, "You know we sang the same songs when I was a little girl, with the same little routines."

Which made me think that there must be at least 70 years' worth of schoolchildren who have had the same anticipation and excitement each year; 6 year olds who can't wait to dress up as gingerbread men (for the song about gingerbread land), 7 year olds who can't wait to graduate from being gingerbread men into being the mice for the "hejsan, hoppsan, falderejderal" song, 8 year olds who can't wait to be able to hold a live candle instead of a small battery-operated electric one.

I was disappointed that there wasn't a stjärngosse in sight - not even one little boy in a pointy hat singing with the girls. But my disappointment was quelled when, about a third of the way into the program, they brought out a whole choir of 7-year-old boys, all dressed in little red and white hats and outfits. Someone had wised up and realized that the best way to get the boys to sing was to create a choir especially for them - but oh, the poor woman who has to lead a rehearsal of a choir of some 20 little boys.

They were a bit squirmy, and took a lot more guidance than the girls to get them into a straight line, but they sang as best they could, then holding hands and forming four circles and dancing round the stage. All except one little boy who just squirmed, to the great irritation of the little boy next to him who kept trying to get him to stop, imploring the teacher with his eyes, a look of exasperation on his face.

Me, I would've been that little boy trying to quiet the other boy. I surely must've been a bit of a prig. I suppose I was an unsufferable child when it came to these kinds of things. It makes me squirm just to think about it now.

The Swedish phrase for the day is levande ljus. The literal translation would be living light, but the actual meaning is a candle.

- by Francis S.

I am a little kid at heart. That is, when given the chance and in the right circumstances, I revert back to my childhood habits. For instance, last week on Wednesday, the team I am responsible for at work went out for an afternoon and evening of, uh, teambuilding. Which consisted of a session of chocolate tasting (lots of little bite-sized niblet-y things on a plate: chocolate- caramel tartlets, chocolate- passionfruit tartlets, mocha mousse, gingerbread ice cream, saffron creme brulée, you get the picture), then a session at the laser dome, wherein the boys teamed up against the girls (yeah, right, they kicked our sad little boy asses) in one of those weird black smoky maze things, each armed with a "laser gun" and garbed in a vest that marked off how often we were shot and where. Then we had a nice dinner afterwards at a nearby very mysigt, i.e. cozy, restaurant.

One of the things that fascinates me (and drives me crazy) about Sweden - or at least about my company - is the assumption employees make that the main role of an employer is to keep them happy at any cost. So, I spend an enormous amount of energy on this. Hence the night of fun. Still, it was fun.

But, back to the little kid bit. Which was that when I played this stupid but extraordinarily entertaining shoot-em up game at the laser dome (I'm a closet wannabe warrior, I guess), I was running all over the place like an ass, a real maniac, and while I shot more people than anyone else, I was also shot more than anyone else and ended up with the lowest score, which I had predicted to everyone before we began and which they all found very amusing. I had no strategy, I just ran and shot, ran and shot. I would be dead in about two seconds in a real war.

I was in fact acting just how I remember acting as a little kid whenever there was some big party in the neighborhood or with my relatives (a bit of trivia - I have nearly 80 first cousins) or at church: I just ran around and around and around, yelling and laughing and exhausting myself, hour after hour, pausing only for an occasional cookie or a glass of kool-aid, only to fall asleep within five seconds in the car on the way home.

Oh, it was fun.

The Swedish word for the day is barndom. It means childhood.

- by Francis S.

It's a hell hole out there, trying to elbow your way through the crowds on Skånegatan and Götgatsbacken, not to mention inside Coctail and Granit.

And to think I used to like Christmas shopping.

The Swedish word for the day is julklapp. It means Christmas present.

- by Francis S.

This 5.818- degrees- of- separation thing is interesting. But I wonder what formula is used for figuring out the recommended reading?

- by Francis S.

Yesterday, I was quite negligent in marking the fact that it was Lucia - the feast day of Saint Lucy - which is the first important day in the Christmas season in Sweden. So, here is another Swedish lesson.

4. Lucia. For those who have children, the day usually starts with them getting up very early and celebrating the event at school with a lussetåg (which literally means a Lucia train), or procession led by a girl representing Lucia, wearing a long white gown with a red sash, and on her head a garland of green leaves as well as lighted candles. Behind her are additional girls dressed in white and with garlands in their hair, but with candles in their hands rather than on their heads, as well as boys - stjärngosse, or star boy - in white but without the sashes, and tall pointy dunce hats with stars on them, not unlike the hat Mickey Mouse wears in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." The whole procession sings:

Natten går tunga fjät
rund gård och stuva;
kring jord, som sol förlät,
skuggorna ruva.
Då i vårt mörka hus,
stiger med tända ljus,
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

(which translates to:

The night goes with weighty step
round yard and (stove i.e. house, hearth?)
round earth, the sun departs
leave the woods brooding
There in our dark house,
appears with lighted candles
Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia.)

These processions are also held in churches and various other public places. The ritual is quite beautiful, and Swedes are great singers so the music is often superb: vibrato-free clear and pure and high children's voices singing in three- or four-part harmony. They also sing other songs, such as Staffansvisa - St. Stephen's song. And of course you need to eat Lussekatter, which are saffron pastries in the (very abstract) shape of a cat. It seems a little odd that this Lutheran country celebrates the feast day of an Italian saint who was martyred by having her eyes poked out, poor thing. I think it must surely have something to do with Lucia meaning, well, "light" - lux in Latin - and that the feast day is close to the winter solstice when the light finally starts to come back, slowly but surely, to this dark part of the world.

I will see a live lussetåg on Sunday (which is unusual, it's supposed to be on Dec. 13), when my friend the photographer's daughter will be singing at a whole long Lucia program - she could have been the Lucia, but she was busy taking a test or something when they were making the choice. Damn.

- by Francis S.

Extracts from a recent exchange of e-mails between me and my buddy K. on my own sad hopes and dreams about the bathroom being finished at last(I've rearranged the order for your reading pleasure):

----- Original Message -----
From: "Francis Strand"
To: "K."
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 11:42 AM
Subject: RE: it's friday

Tell her I said "hej" and have fun!

(The tiles and mirror are now in the WC, and the toilet and lights are
supposed to be in when I get home... it looks fanfuckingtastic!)

-----Original Message-----
From: K.
Sent: den 14 December 2001 17:50
To: Francis Strand
Subject: Re: it's friday


I just had to laugh. and laugh and laugh and laugh at your "the toilet and
lights are supposed to be in when I get home."

Poor Francis. So trusting. So innocent.

Well, you just go ahead and enjoy that toilet and those lights this weekend!

-----Original Message-----
From: Francis Strand
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 11:45 AM
To: K.
Subject: Re: it's friday


Oh, shite. I AM such a pathetic idiot, aren't I.

Addendum added at 11.26 p.m.: Sadly, K. was all too right to laugh. Lights, yes; toilet, no. The contractor wins this round, yet again.

- by Francis S.

Me and God sing on Christmas evening.
Holy christmas. Sacred choir. Honey!
Joseph drives on Christmas noon.
All you want for Christmas are my snowy carpets.
Rudolf was a merry reindeer.

This Christmas Carol generator site features pure poetry.

- by Francis S.

One of my favorite words in Swedish, kissnödig, doesn't readily translate into one nice, neat word. It requires a whole phrase: in need of a WC.

Isn't Swedish great?

- by Francis S.

Peter, my favorite secret king, was just writing about the Paris of his imagination, the movie "Amelie från Montmartre" (or whatever the name of it is if you don't live in Sweden), and whether U.S. citizens are as immediately recognizeable as the French, even before they open their mouths.

Let me start from the back and move my way forwards.

1) People from the U.S. We are loud and we like to talk, so you never really get a chance to see anyone before he or she has started to speak. This means it's very hard to say whether the language and accent give us away. But we do have distinctive traits. For instance, we seem to take up about 10 feet of personal space on either side of us which not only shoves all the oxygen out of small rooms but tends to smack unsuspecting people in the face if they get too near. Not that we mean to smack people in the face with our personal space, it just kind of happens. Oh, and we love hyperbole: ''I love your hair." or "I would die for a coke." My husband loves these expressions.

2) "Amelie från Montmartre." As I mentioned before, I haven't seen the movie, but the pictures of Audrey Tatou look just like the pictures of Melinda to me. Uh, if Audrey had purple hair.

3) Paris of the imagination. Peter, the real thing is, in fact, every bit as lovely as you imagine. Block after block, arrondisement after arrondisement of heart-stopping beauty. It is somehow like New York, I suppose because both cities don't understand why anyone would live anywhere else. And both cities have convinced the rest of the world that they are superior to every other city. And they're right, of course.

The Swedish word for the day is oehört. It means tremendously.

- by Francis S.

I read a couple of days ago at realitysandwiches about The Mayfly Project. The idea behind this (likely) meme is to sum up your 2001 in a manner similar to the oft-cited description of the life of a mayfly: Born. Eat. Shag. Die.

The rule is only 20 words.

Naturally, I had to put my own hifalutin twist on it, which is not exactly in the spirit of the thing while yet sticking to the 20-word rule. (This could explain that there is some genetic reason behind my 8-year-old nephew's inclination to always add some unnecessary complication to things in an effort to be funny. He usually succeeds. Me, I wish I was as funny and creative as he is.)

Here is my take on the year:

2001: A Shakespearian tragedy

At home, it's double, double toilet trouble;
At work, job satisfaction's just about burst its bubble.

- by Francis S.

On this dim and misty morning, the lights of the city obscured by the wet, I was just a couple of narrow old cobble-stoned streets from the office when a woman some 20 meters in front of me called out "Har du sett en hund?"

I didn't understand her. First I said, "Vad sade du?" (Which literally means what did you say and is the Swedish equivalent of excuse me when one hasn't caught what someone else has just said.)

But when she repeated it and I still didn't understand, I had to say "I'm sorry...?" (Which to my ears that seem to refuse to understand anything other than English, sounds remarkably like "Vad sade du" - which is pronounced something like vahsahroo. "Vahsahroo" - "I'm sorry," do you, uh, hear what I mean?)

And as she said, "Have you seen a dog?" I realized what she had asked me.

"No, sorry," I said.

Sometimes it seems like the road ahead is so long, that I am failing utterly at learning this language.

- by Francis S.

The Nobel Prize dinner was yesterday. While the prizes are one of the few things Sweden does that is recognized worldwide, the dinner itself is pretty much a local event. And the whole dinner is broadcast on one of the state television channels. I missed the beginning, but I did see the glassparaden, which consists of a host of waiters done up all fancy-like marching down the steps holding platters of ice cream done up all fancy-like (this year it was vanilla ice cream with black current sorbet) to the accompaniment of a trumpet fanfare. The king always serves himself.

I also listened to V.S. Naipaul's speech (which was slight but amusing), and then the speech by Leland Hartwell, who won for medicine. But the next guy, chemistry prize-winner Barry Sharpless, started going on and on about carbon being the center of everything and nature being right-handed and he was trying so hard to say something profound yet graspable, but it was all coming out a jumble. I get so embarrassed for people when they stumble in front of a crowd like that, so I had to go smoke a cigarette and ended up missing the rest of the speeches.

Throughout the whole ceremony, I thought how odd it is that we are so drawn to televised pageantry related to prize-winning (uh, I am referring - in a barely graspable way - to Miss America, the Academy Awards, etc.) but this is surely the only pageant of prize-winners on television where the contestants actually do things that have a profound and long-lasting impact on life.

- by Francis S.

I was going along a straight wide road, keeping close to the kerb, not looking behind or bothering about the traffic at all.... I heard a voice through a great cloud of agony and sickness. The voice was asking questions. It seemed to be opening and closing like a concertina. The words were loud, as the swelling notes of an organ, then they melted to the tiniest wiry tinkle of water in a glass. I knew that I was lying on my back on the grass; I could feel the shiny blades on my neck. I was staring at the sky and I could not move.

From A Voice Through a Cloud by Denton Welch, one of my favorite writers. He died in 1948 when he was only 33, more or less as a result of injuries sustained in a bicycle accident when he was 20 that is described in the above excerpt. His books - Maiden Voyage, In Youth is Pleasure as well as his short stories - are all extremely autobiographical, and although that quote sounds terribly bleak, in fact his writing is very egocentric but everything and everyone is observed with such a keen eye, the writing so clean and precise, it's a delightful read.

There is a self-portrait of Denton Welch in the National Portrait Gallery in London. I was shocked and moved when I saw it in an upper room somewhere with other writers. He looks like a school boy in the painting.

The Swedish word for the day is okänd. It means unknown.

- by Francis S.

Saturday night I made eggplant parmesan and we had the priest and her boyfriend the policeman over.

We ended up talking about guns, of course, which is no surprise considering the latest shoot-em up in America.

There are about 10 people killed by guns in Sweden every year, the policeman said, even though Sweden has one of the highest per capita gun ownership percentages in Europe (it's just very heavily controlled).

Ten. Ten.

"Only ten?" I asked.

Yes, only 10, he said. "There are about 120 murders every year. Knifings mostly. Knives are just about as bad as guns."

The husband and I disagreed, of course, noting that it'd be pretty hard to knife 20 people in a post office, say, but it takes only seconds to kill 20 with an AK47. Plus, children aren't likely to accidentally slash their throats or fatally stab themselves in the liver or heart with a knife they happen to find in the top drawer of their daddy's bureau.

"Is it true that the NRA was trying to get it so that you could buy one gun a month if you wanted to?" the priest asked. (It was most interesting that the priest even knows that there is such a thing as the NRA, which gets my vote for being perhaps the most all-out evil organization in the U.S. My ex used to call it "the criminal's lobby.")

She and the policeman were shocked when I told them that they were confused, it was actually anti-gun laws in Virginia that the NRA opposed that were trying to limit people to one semi-automatic weapon a month.

"Ha ha," they laughed weakly.

But, to be fair, every country has its difficulties with crime.

"The thing that's most scary about crime in Sweden is that alcohol is involved in roughly 95 percent of all killings," the policeman said.

The Swedish word for the day is mord. It means murder.

- by Francis S.

What is the purpose of watching the video of a wedding one has actually attended in person? I can understand the bride and groom wanting to watch it again, or even the various parents involved. But for me, a second-hand guest, well, it wasn't the thrill of a lifetime to have dinner followed by wedding-video viewing last night in suburban Stockholm with The Parents of The Bride of the Wedding in Athens. Although watching the nearly endless video was almost redeemed by seeing my husband doing his "Y.M.C.A." routine again, complete with lots of pelvic thrusting and crotch grabbing, not to mention the arm movements spelling out the letters Y.M.C.A. - although he seemed to be spelling something in Greek instead, those definitely were not letters in the Roman alphabet. And he doesn't even know Greek, which is even more amazing!

The Swedish word for the day is komiker. It means comedian.

- by Francis S.

It must be embarrassing for a company when advertising gains something in translation, something unintended and, well, perhaps a little sordid, inappropriate at a minimum - especially advertising that is published in a country's No. 1 newspaper.

I wonder if heads are rolling in the marketing department at Locum - which I originally thought was a Swedish realtor but the husband informs me it is some kind of public hospital organization - ?

The Swedish word for the day is misstag. It means error.

- by Francis S.

With my beloved little brother, I used to play a game that I'm sure many of you have played: if a classic and wretched television show - "The Andy Griffith Show," for example (that show ran in reruns throughout my childhood and I always hated it) - were made into a movie, who would play Andy, Barney, Aunt Bea, Opie, and so on. You could go for the outré - Fairuza Balk as Aunt Bea (Fairuza looks great in white hair) - or the realistic - John Turturro as Barney Fife. Or just go for plain old humor - Spike Lee as Opie.

This was all quite entertaining, until they started actually making these movies. (Uh, who's playing Shaggy in the upcoming Scooby-Doo movie, anyone know?)

But, it looks like Jonno's boyfriend, Richard, has a much funnier, vaguely related alternative: the perfect pitch.

- by Francis S.

We finally christened the shower last night. I hope that noise doesn't travel down the pipes to all our various neighbors below, but I have my suspicions that it does.

The Swedish word for the day is pinsamt. It means embarrassing.

- by Francis S.

It was bound to happen. The meta-test. Please excuse the use of the prefix "meta." (A tip of the hat to David).

- by Francis S.

K. has gone back to the New World, with a brief layover in Iceland. She tells me that on the way here, she discovered that the airport, Keflavik, has been completely remodeled. It's no longer basically a hallway with a bunch of doors off of it that are the gates. Instead, it's now full of glass and Escher-like, as you take the up escalator you can see where you are supposed to be on the down escalator, but you can't figure out how to get there. Which I suppose is just as vaguely hallucinatory as the long hallway was, considering how whacked out one invariably is on a dark midwinter Iceland layover.

I was in the middle of a meeting outside the office when she left, natch, and I hadn't managed to say goodbye to her and when I realized it, I suddenly had to excuse myself and give her a ring from the men's room, although I didn't tell her that's where I was.

She'll be back in January.

While she was here, I introduced her to Queer as Folk (the original British version - I haven't seen the U.S. version) and she was instantly addicted, hating the character of Stuart at the beginning and then having a huge crush on him by the end, finding that the actor who played Vince looked like a certain type of Boston Irish frat boy that she finds, er, unattractive.

''They showed this on channel 1 on Swedish television?'' she asked.

Yes, the husband told her. But kind of late, like 10:30 or maybe 11 o'clock. They could never show that in America, the husband asked, could they?

''Not on the American version of channel 1,'' she said. And indeed, America allows rather extreme violence on network television, but not near-naked men simulating sex (and there weren't even any hard-ons. No real, uh, soft-ons either, if I recall correctly). Because we Americans are so weird about sex.

I wonder, is it still true that there are a significant number - maybe not the majority, but still - of undergraduates who actually believe that it is better not to have sex unless it's with that special someone, preferably someone they are about to marry or, in some cases, on their wedding night?

Because this is what these horrible "Take back your hymen" and "Scared sexless" and "Sex suspect" sex education programs preach: Sex is something to be afraid of. Which is an awful thing to teach someone.

So, the Swedish word for the day has got to be sex. It means both the number six, as well as sex, which can make for some interesting confusion on occasion.

- by Francis S.

I've always said I don't really miss anything from the U.S.

I've been lying all this time and didn't realize it, until now.

I miss Lesbian Christmas musicales.

The Swedish word for the day is gullig. It means cute.

- by Francis S.

We at long last have a shower. There are no lights in it yet, and there are still some pieces of hardware missing, but if we put some candles on the floor and keep the door open, we can take long hot showers to our hearts' content. The husband was ecstatic despite his nasty cold.

Of course the cold wasn't nasty enough to stop him from vacuuming and mopping the floors throughout the apartment even though I told him he should be lying on the sofa drinking tea. Which is okay, I suppose. It always makes him feel better to clean things.

Me, I like it neat, but I hate cleaning. That's what cleaning ladies are for.

The Swedish word for the day is tvål. It means soap.

- by Francis S.

So, in response to World AIDS Day, and in keeping with my participating in Link and Think, today's writing is about, well, HIV and AIDS.

Make sure you're in a comfortable chair with something tasty to nibble on, because it's gonna be a long story.

I first remember reading about it - in the Washington Post I think - before it had a name. I was living with my ex in this teeny-tiny studio apartment at 7th and A Streets NE, in Washington, D.C. This would have been 1983 or so. Gay men, drug addicts and Haitians were all getting weird cancers, their immune systems pathetically feeble and failing them utterly.

It didn't register much at first.

But over time, the facts became less hazy and this phenomenon acquired a name, two names in fact: AIDS - acquired immune deficiency syndrome - and ARC - AIDS-related complex. AIDS killed you, but ARC was a sort of pre-AIDS, or maybe it never led to fullblown AIDS. They just didn't know. They hadn't yet discovered what exactly caused it, but they more or less knew that it could be transferred through sex or sharing needles. They thought maybe drugs - poppers, amyl nitrate - had something to do with it. Everything was shrouded in mystery, and a lot of people were scared that they could catch AIDS from drinking from the same glass of water a gay man had just drunk from.

By 1984-1985, the worry had set in for us. Sometime around then it was discovered that HIV causes AIDS. I decided it would be highly likely that I had contracted HIV sometime in the years before 1982, before I'd gotten together with my ex. And what made the worry terrible in some ways was that my ex refused to get tested, reasoning that since there was nothing they could do about it anyway, and since we were monogamous, it would only make his life worse to know.

Me, I went along with him, not because I agreed, but because that was what he wanted.

Looking back on it, this virus was lurking in the back of our minds all the time, every day. Any cold or flu bug, any feelings of fatigue, any bruise, all were examined closely but silently - I never spoke of any of it for fear of getting my ex upset. And I assumed the worst. It's so strange to look back on it now, I've really forgotten completely how much that damned virus haunted me.

In 1987, when I came back from two years at university in Manhattan with my degree in hand, and after I had gotten my first real job, at my instigation we contacted the Whitman Walker Clinic, which had started as a free VD clinic for gay men in the '70s, and early on in the epidemic had become the primary institution serving people with HIV in Washington DC. We became "buddies" with a man who was critically ill. We underwent several days of training, even attending a weekend-long workshop on death. Our buddy, G., lived in one of the six houses that the clinic maintained for people who had no other place to go.

We met him in December, and by February he had died. We visited him several times weekly, fixed meals for him, brought him to the doctor, took him shopping and out to a restaurant once; within a month of our meeting him, he was bedridden and couldn't go out.

His funeral was held in the Church of God of the Two Worlds, a strange vaguely Christian spiritualist church. He was buried somewhere outside Shepardstown, W. Virginia. We hardly knew him, not really.

We never became buddies with anyone else after G. died. Fear, I suppose. It brought it all too close, especially since we didn't know our own status. I did know, however, that several of my good friends were HIV positive. My high school sweetheart (the male one), another guy with whom I'd lived with briefly in Atlanta. My best friend in D.C. who'd moved to Chicago.

I guess it must have been in 1989 or 1990 that my ex finally decided that he wanted to know. I'm not sure, perhaps AZT had just shown up on the scene, although I seem to think this was before then. Whatever it was, he had decided that not knowing was worse than knowing could be.

We went to our doctor, who wasn't gay, but said that we should not have our insurance pay for the test because then they would discriminate against us. He would do it anonymously. He was a wonderful doctor.

Waiting that week - it took a week in those days - was utter hell. Mostly because my ex was crazed. Me, I'm pretty good at ignoring things, pushing them down into the back of my mind somewhere. And despite my knowing all these people and having witnessed someone, more or less, die from it, it wasn't real to me anyway.

The results came back negative.

I suppose that our lives changed at that moment. But to be honest, I don't remember it, not really.

- by Francis S.

I met my high school sweetheart - the one who was a boy, not the one who was a girl - in my freshman acting class. He was two years older than me, and he knew my sister.

He was a rather visible presence in our high school of 2,500 students, which was quite a feat. He was an artist, he was obsessed with history, he was wickedly funny and earnest, he did stupid things like running around with a red magic marker, ''slashing'' the throats of various teachers, which nearly got him expelled.

He was the leader of a large group of students who didn't quite fit in anywhere else - some of them were vaguely into acting or debate or orchestra, some were sort of jocks, but all of them were somehow outside the groups of students who were really into those things.

And, most important of all, my friend Mary said, "Robert Feiger told me that he fools around with boys." This, however, was not a generally known fact.

Five months later, on a school trip to London, I found out, as I'd hoped, that this was true. He fooled around with boys, and he really liked me. It was a huge release to have sex with him, to passionately kiss someone who was physically a man (I was small and a late-bloomer; he was hairy and muscular though he was only 17). It also made me terribly sad, I wandered around London with him, morose in most bittersweet way, feeling as if I'd lost something and that I was no longer a child.

So we became boyfriends. Secret boyfriends, but real boyfriends nonetheless. The relationship was full of drama and clandestine sex. Everything an adolescent love affair should be, despite the need to hide it all. I think he felt guilty about it, but I didn't, not really, mostly because early on I told my sister about it and she let me know that not only was there nothing wrong with this, but that it was in fact a good thing.

The relationship lasted on and off for a good six years, through both of us going off to college, through him getting his first - and only - job at the Washington Post and finally ended when I moved to D.C. to be with him. (After three weeks, we called it quits for good.)

But we stayed in touch. He left the Post and moved to Boston, working as a freelancer. I stayed in D.C. and, more or less, got married, bought a house and became firmly ensonced in the oddly dangerous safety of being part of a couple.

He lost some of his charm. His ideosyncracies became irritating, his earnestness became shrill, his convictions turned into pomposity. I found him hard to take. I suppose I'm still angry with him, somehow, for not living up to what I wanted him to always be.

He called me one day when I was at the office and told me that he had been raped. He had been raped and had contracted HIV. It had happened in Boston Common, a group of thugs, he said, had beaten him up and violated him.

It made me sad, and irritated that he only talked to me when he had bad news. And I suppose I pulled away from him. I suppose it scared me as well. I didn't know what to do or say, and I felt useless, helpless and outside his life.

We didn't see each other for quite awhile after this. Then, several years later, my beloved little brother was visiting and we went to the National Gallery. In the room with all those lovely Dutch paintings - Rembrandt and Hals portraits, a Vermeer - we ran into him. He was visiting Washington as well. And so, we got back into touch, briefly.

The next year, I went to Chicago one late spring week for a conference, and I decided to see him. He had moved back in with his parents.

He had turned frail, although I was very ungenerous with him. He looked well enough, but he required a cane to walk. I thought he was deliberately courting pity. He couldn't see very well, he said, but I thought he seemed to be able to see just fine. We sat and had coffee in a cafe that was in what had been the paint store on the main street of the town we had both grown up in, and it seemed to me he wanted people to look at him and see that he was dying, and this made me intensely irritated, and then ashamed of myself for being irritated.

He told me he was having portions of his journal and drawings published in the Post, the diary of a dying man. And he talked about how much he regretted having treated his parents badly, of having been unfair to his longtime Finnish boyfriend, of never having given love a chance. And I could only say to him that he had had a great life nonetheless, done things and been things that he should be most proud of. But even though you must say such things, that you know them to be true, they don't seem to give solace.

They did publish the diaries, a couple of months after he died, which was not quite a year after my visit to Chicago.

I couldn't read those diaries, mostly because he retold the story of being raped, but changed the details so significantly that I can only believe them to be a lie, which I suspected from the beginning. And it upset me so that he felt he had to lie about such a thing, that he must have felt such shame at thinking that he was somehow responsible for contracting HIV that he needed to concoct a story that removed any possible blame. As if one should possibly blame him, that blame is a word that should ever, ever be associated with HIV.

It makes me cry still, as I write this, and makes me furious with him. It's hard to have such feelings about someone you love. And I still, five years after the fact, don't really think that he is dead.

Finally, it is ironic and I sometimes catch myself wondering whether he has somehow manouvered my life so that I have ended up in Scandinavia, a place he always romanticized all out of proportion and where he wanted always to live but never did.

- by Francis S.

My best buddy, K., is in town.

I'm finally over my hangover resulting from a) forgetting to eat both lunch and dinner yesterday; and b) drinking too much beer with K last night.

K. used to work with me, sitting at the desk next to mine. I love her because we have almost the exact same sense of humor, a sense of humor that relies heavily on needless repetition, utter idiocy and wanton hyperbole. Who would have thought I would move to Stockholm and find a fellow American who thinks the same stupid things are funny as I do? Not me, not me.

She moved back to the States about a year ago, although she's been back here in Stockholm for a total of three months since then. Still, I hadn't realized how very much I missed her, as we sat in the window in Kleins, smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes apiece (yeah, yeah, I know, I quit) and having a field day with all the shit that has happened to us over the past 6 months or so. Like her breaking up with her boyfriend. Like me explaining yet again why I've decided I can be happy not having kids, and then for the first time in 10 years thinking, hell, maybe I've changed my mind. Maybe I do want to have kids after all.

Of course I haven't had a chance to mention this revelation to the husband because he was sound asleep when I stumbled in the door last night at 11:45.

The Swedish word for the day is bebis. It means baby.

- by Francis S.

I've now added two blog-related links in response to World AIDS Day.

But, isn't that an awful name for it? Didn't it used to be World AIDS Awareness Day? It makes it sound too much like it's a celebration, a holiday, a feast in honor of AIDS, rather than an observance. And worse, it sounds as if the whole world and all the people in it should aspire to getting AIDS.

Oh well.

- by Francis S.

The Christmas trees are up in Stortorget, Kornhamnstorg and Mosebacke torg. Greenery and white lights are hanging from the second storeys of the houses lining the winding streets of Gamla Stan. The big department store, NK, has gone all out, as usual, with its own greenery and lights. On Skeppsbron, they've even put together the huge live tree (pieced together somehow from parts of smaller trees, it's very barbaric but the result is a picture-perfect hundred-foot tree). And last but not least, my favorite, the julmarknad - Christmas market - is up in Stortorget as well: two rings of red wooden stalls selling glögg, pepparkakor and cheap little wooden trinkets.

So now it's time to learn one of the two Swedish snaps visor - drinking songs - that I can actually sing, one especially popular at Christmastime:

Hej, tomtegubbar slå i glasen och låt oss lustiga vara!
Hej tomtegubbar slå i glasen och låt oss lustiga vara!
En liten tid
Vi leva här
Med mycket möde och stort besvär!
Hej, tomtegubbar slå i glasen och låt oss lustiga vara!

And dammit, I can't find a real translation, but my own version, taking many liberties with the language, would go something like this:

Hey, goblins, toss back a glass and let's have fun.
Hey, goblins, toss back a glass and let's have fun.
We only live here a short while, and life is full of awful hardship and terrible trouble.
So, goblins, toss back a glass and let's have fun.

As you can see, the Swedes have a rather grim sense of humor.

I love it.

- by Francis S.

Woo-hoo. Another language milestone has been passed. My first (heavily edited) article in Swedish will be coming out in one of the company's magazines, a sort of Swedish Gourmet produced for the company that makes Absolut vodka.

I've contributed before with short restaurant reviews that I wrote in English and then were translated, but this one - on a surreal meal I ate at a restaurant in Mykonos shortly after the beginning of the nastiness in the United States - I actually wrote myself in Swedish.

Which isn't to say that I'm not still a big fat sissy when it comes to speaking Swedish. It's just that it's a lot safer to write it.

The Swedish word for the day is stolt. It means proud.

- by Francis S.

Talk about self-referential experiences. I just got back from seeing Moulin Rouge - movies come late to Sweden, although to be honest this has been out for awhile - and the movie theater we saw it at is called the rödda kvarn, which means red mill. Which is what moulin rouge means, of course. Then to top the whole thing off, the actual red curtains in the theater do some strange elaborate choreographed number, going in and out of each other, then finally opening properly, immediately followed by the opening of the movie, which consists of red curtains opening behind a tiny conductor.

The whole thing was mind-boggling.

- by Francis S.

Being a tourist gives one such a strange impression of a place. Lisbon, for instance, seems to be a place that has never quite re-achieved the glory of its golden age before the big earthquake hit. That was, oh, 250 years ago. Everything is imbued with a sense of former greatness, of sadness and longing, of brutality, of dust and smoke.

But I suppose it's hard not to get such an impression if you spend your days visiting the ruins of castles perched on hills, reading that where the current national theater sits at one end of Rossio square used to sit the palace of the inquisition, and that the center of the square was a popular site for countless numbers of everyone's favorite public spectacle, the auto da fé, which was quite the trendy thing in its day. Nothing like burning people alive when it comes to thrilling spectator sports.

We visited museums filled with Persian velvets and portraits by Rembrandt, we saw various summer palaces in Sintra, fishing villages perched on cliffs tumbling down into the Atlantic, and we watched the sun set at the point furthest west on continental Europe at Cabo da Roca. We ate cod and wild boar and cheese pastries. We took wild tram rides up and down the hills of Lisbon. From the balcony of our hotel, we watched the town of Cascais turn an uncertain pink with the dusk, the fishing boats moving ever so slowly like black cows grazing in the water, the lighthouse at last flashing as the dark finally took over.

And yet it feels so wonderful to be home in good old Sweden at last.

The husband is overjoyed to be ridding everything in the apartment of the thick layer of dust that the workmen managed to leave although they weren't actually supposed to be even doing anything, anything at all.

The Swedish word for the day is bekväm. It means comfortable.

- by Francis S.

This morning is one of those sublime winter mornings. Strangely, although the sky is mostly blue there were stray snowflakes tumbling down as I walked out onto the street from the apartment. Then, walking down the steps on the bluff at Mosebacke, spread below me was Gamla Stan, the old town, lit by that strange, glancing winter sun, picking out the fancy brickwork and lacy iron on the spire of the German church and making it look even more beautiful than it is.

The husband and I are off to Lisbon tomorrow morning first thing. I can't begin to describe how badly I need this holiday. We'll be back in a week, bringing with us tales and veritable sonnets from the Portuguese (apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poems had nothing to do with Portugal but rather referred to a nickname of hers).

The Swedish verb for the day is att resa. It means to travel.

- by Francis S.

I wonder if I've been eating so much sushi - lunch and dinner yesterday, plus lunch today, none of it my choice - that I am in danger of getting parasites. How much sushi does it take, statistically, to get some kind of nasty wormlike thing living the high life in one's intestines, inviting its friends over for all-night keg parties and puking all over the, uh, front lawn, so to speak...?

The Swedish word for the day is fisk. It means fish.

- by Francis S.

When I lived in Barcelona, I told all my friends in the United States that I had no intention of becoming an expatriate, that I was American through and through. Which I suppose I believed.

''Ex-patriots are such an unhealthy lot,'' I said. ''They hang out in incestuous little groups and drink too much, complaining about the country they live in, having untidy affairs with each other and regretting it.''

And I had planned all along to go back at the end of my stay, which I did. But in-between I met the husband, and ended up despite my best intentions, an expatriate up in the far north reaches of the world.

I try very hard not to complain about Sweden, and I try very hard to avoid sundry groups of alcoholic expatriates that most definitely do exist, even in Stockholm.

But it does feel odd sometimes, not that I ever really miss the States. And of course there is an assumption made by certain other people that I won't stay. For instance, I just got a letter from the moving company that shipped my things over from the New World to the Old. The letter was in English of course, and noted that most people who move to Sweden only stay a couple of years, and wasn't I thinking of moving, and they would be happy to move me if, as most people, I was about to move since my two years were up.

The husband was quite insulted by this letter. It didn't bother me much. I think the reality is that most people don't stay.

Me, I'm in it for the long haul.

The Swedish word for the day is tålamod. It means patience.

- by Francis S.

I've just snuck away to my desk, escaping from an office party for the company's customers. There is nothing worse than this kind of party - the schmoozing, the smiling and laughing, the unfortunate choice of entertainment (a fake talk show with some well-known Swedish journalist), the mediocre finger food, the dirty napkins, and the people, oh, the people. I'm going to have to go back in a minute. I absolutely loathe it.

The Swedish word for the day is bajskorv. Literally, it means something like poo sausage, but a better translation would be poop. It's a little kid cuss.

- by Francis S.

Oh, and happy anniversary to America's favorite gay ex- roommate bi- coastal bloggin' not- really sweethearts, Choire and Philo of eastwest.nu.

If you want to forget the latest hell going on in New York, I highly recommend Choire's novel in progress, all part of this write- a- novel month or whatever exactly the long, proper name is, otherwise known as November. The novel started out tarty enough, but now seems to have taken a turn for the outré, making me laugh out loud (I think it was the animal- rights fanatic deprogramming camp that did it.)

The Swedish word for the day is grattis. It means congratulations and should not be confused with gratis, which means free, as in ''along with your 15-piece ginsu knive set, you get this free key chain cast from Ari Fleisher's actual lips.''

- by Francis S.

Oh, poor New York City.

- by Francis S.

I just bought four Garbos tårar - Garbo's tears - at Gustafssons Konditori. I wonder who first thought up the idea of naming pastries after fascinating women? Swedish pastries definitely follow the named- after- famous- chicks rule, with pastries called "Tosca." Or "Garbo." Although I'm not sure that Garbo would have had such sweet chocolatey raspberryish almond- pastey champagney tears. Her smiles, now those were meltingly beautiful, but I would imagine her tears to have been much more bittersweet.

- by Francis S.

I think I've surely forgotten to mention that I could really use a cigarette.

- by Francis S.

I think that doctors have something in common with contractors: Both are completely immune to the discomfort they cause you. And in the case of contractors, I marvel at their ability to remain totally unfazed when you - or, to be honest, your husband, who has been dealing with the contractor all along - become hysterical because they still haven't bothered to buy any of the tile that you requested four fucking months ago and so it looks like you are going to be without a bathroom for an additional month while the tile is being shipped from France.

It is also amazing how this problem with contractors seems to cross all cultural boundaries. At least in my experience from having lived in three different countries.

I am so very sick of this renovation.

- by Francis S.

The husband and I are going to Portugal in a week for a brief holiday, meeting an old friend of mine, E.A., from Washington - she is a great traveler, we first became good friends when traveling on business together for a month in thrilling places like Columbus, Georgia and Jacksonville, South Carolina, not to mention the great republic of Panama.

In the summer the three of us (and possibly her girlfriend as well) had planned on going to Egypt at this time, but in the end opted for Portugal, given the, uh, war going on.

When I was living in Barcelona, I always planned on going to Portugal, but in the end, I hardly saw even much of Spain aside from Barcelona and a week-long trip going south along the coast down to Valencia and then Denia, with a detour to a lovely tiny walled town, Morella, perched below the ruins of a castle on a hill. Then Cuenca with its gorges, then to another small town with a cathedral and intact castle, Siguenza, before the trip was cut short and I ended up in Madrid, taking a train back up to Barcelona.

At any rate, any suggestions on what to do or where to eat in Lisbon or places to see within driving distance (we're staying in Cintra for a couple of days also, I seem to recall), are welcome.

- by Francis S.

Did I forget to mention how much I'm longing for a cigarette?

- by Francis S.

The comment function is now back up and running at long last, after a switch from Reblogger to Blogback. Let's hope this does the trick, for awhile at least. Now you can comment to your heart's delight.

- by Francis S.

The Swedish word for the day is McBengt. I bet you would never have guessed that it means a double hamburger with cheese, lettuce, roasted onion, mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise.

(Okay, it's not really a Swedish word but rather some bizarre American- cultural- imperialistic corporate concoction dreamed up, no doubt, by Swedes, but by no means Swedish. Still, I thought it was funny.)

- by Francis S.

It's snowing great fat smeary flakes. They didn't stick to the cobbles and paving stones of Gamla Stan - the old town, where my office sits, smack dab in front of the royal palace - but once I reached the sluice on my way home, the snowflakes seemed to be painting the sidewalks white as I passed, so thick and wet that my gloves were soaked through just brushing the snow off my overcoat when I came in from the cold, at our apartment building.

I love the first snow of the winter. It makes me feel like a little kid again.

The Swedish word for the day is snögubbe. It means snowman.

- by Francis S.

Did I forget to mention that I would kill for a cigarette?

- by Francis S.

Hmmm. Just looked at the picture of my brother from Hallowe'en. He didn't really look like Hedwig from the movie ''Hedwig and the Angry Inch,'' but he did look great. I've decided he's the only one to do my makeup in the future.

His girlfriend, now, she did look more or less like Tommy Gnosis, Hedwig's sometime boyfriend and protege.

- by Francis S.

This morning I had a long conversation with the new Non-Swedish guy at the office. Or rather, it wasn't so much of a conversation as it was him telling me what he thinks about the United States. That this bombing is only going to do the opposite of what it's supposed to. That he had to read Marx for his government classes at university and that he's no Marxist but maybe Marx was right when he said that capitalism will implode because of inequities between rich and poor, and the U.S. is failing to recognize that perhaps that's what is going on, not in one country or another, but on a worldwide scale. That the U.S. needs to change its policies and act in a more just fashion.

And, well, I do agree with him mostly.

But I found him awfully shrill. It's peculiar how it doesn't bother me, usually, when Swedish people criticize the U.S. But being criticized by the new Non-Swedish guy, well, I felt rather bullied and lectured, although he probably didn't mean it that way.

Perhaps if he wasn't quite so fond of the sound of his own voice...

The Swedish word for the day is självbelåten. It means self-satisfied.

- by Francis S.

Did I mention the fact that, yet again, I am dying for a cigarette?
- by Francis S.

What the f-? Reblogger is down yet again... I suppose I should switch, uh, comment providers, but I'm too lazy.
- by Francis S.

Have I mentioned the fact that I am dying for a cigarette?

- by Francis S.

Policemen are your friend [sic].

Well, maybe on another planet, but not here on earth. Not even in Sweden. Oh there are exceptions of course. There is, uh, my friend the policeman, who is a wonderful guy. And I had policeman for a boyfriend when I was 19 and in college in rural Illinois. He was a good guy, too, even if he drove me crazy.

What is so upsetting about this story - smalltown policemen catch two teenaged boys drinking in a car, accuse them of being fags, boys admit it's true (at least according to the police) and police threaten to tell their parents; police finally let them go and one of the boys goes home and kills himself - is that this is merely another example, albeit a bit extreme, of the routine betrayal of kids who happen to be gay. I give schools a lot of credit for stamping out all manner of racial slurs, but it upsets me to no end that most schools don't act the same way when kids use anti-gay pejoratives.

Language is all-powerful, and one thing I am proud of as a citizen of the U.S. is that Americans are awfully good at not only recognizing the power of words, but at balancing freedom of speech with the responsibility it calls for. If only schools recognized this more.

As for the police, well, I don't have much hope there.

The Swedish word for the day is grisar. It means pigs.

- by Francis S.

Rather than go on and on about how unpleasant it is to quit smoking, I think it's time for another short but in-depth lesson on Sweden.

3. The mobile phone (or as they say in America, the cellular).
Everyone in Sweden has a mobile phone. Babies and daddies and big sisters and little brothers. Great Aunt Åsa Britt. The man behind the ticket counter at the subway. Everyone riding on the subway. I think mobile phones are issued at birth - babies are sent home from the hospital with a box of plastic diapers, a terrycloth blanket and a little tiny blue or pink mobile phone with little pink or blue pre-paid cards that already have money on them so baby can call grandma whenever mom and dad are refusing to cooperate.

When I first arrived, I resisted getting a phone. Though they seem to issue them to babies, they don't actually give phones to foreigners - invandrare - when they arrive, interestingly enough. But I was offered one at my job. It wasn't until I got stuck on the subway (that damned green line is the absolute worst subway line in the world, ask anyone from Stockholm, it just stops for 15 minutes at a time with barely a message from the conductor) one too many times and missed business meetings and realized that if I just had had a mobile phone, I could've called Anna Carin and explained why the hell I seemed to have not shown up.

So I gave in, and got a mobile phone. Which in effect made me much more a full member of Swedish society. I suspect that owning a mobile phone is more important than speaking Swedish, when it comes down to it.

Because in fact, society assumes that you have a mobile phone. You don't have to plan in the same way if everyone has a mobile phone. For instance, you can switch gears at the last minute when it comes to what bar you're going to meet your friends at because the first one is too full, too smoky, too uncomfortable. Or, you can easily locate your husband at the airport when he's somehow missed you coming out the international arrivals gate.

Then there's the handfree thing. When I first arrived nearly three years ago, it was disconcerting to see perfectly normal-looking people walking down the street and yakking away to nobody, or worse, my thinking they were trying to say something to me as they walked along when in fact they were just using a handsfree device to talk on the phone without holding it to their ears (and possibly avoid frying their brains with microwaves, although it's debatable about whether these things help or actually make it worse). I did rather quickly realize they were talking on phones, but it still occasionally gives me a bit of a shock.

And then there's the whole SMS thing - short messaging service. Which Americans think is stupid with a capital D. But it isn't. Basically you use your phone to send short messages typed using the keypad, messages that cost almost nothing. I'm almost embarrassed to say what I use it most for - sending unbearably cute little messages to the husband when he's at work: du är min lilla pussgurka. Which means you are my little kiss-cucumber. Yes, it loses something in the translation, but that is a good thing, believe me. Uh, I also use it for other things, like when I forgot to say bon voyage to one of the people who works on the team I manage - she was going on her honeymoon. I knew she was in the air already but she'd get the message when she landed.

The final thing about mobile phones is that once they become such a part of life, they mostly cease to be so goddamned annoying. Yes, people talk too loudly on them in inappropriate places sometimes. Yes, people forget to turn them off at the movie theater or the opera (in movie theaters, for instance, along with the trailers they run a little piece telling you to shut your phone off, so actually it isn't so often that phones go off during a movie). But there's no prestige attached to owning one (well, maybe a little. My first phone seemed hopelessly huge and old-fashioned within months after I bought it. But I've had my trusty Ericsson T28 world for about a year now, and I'm quite in love with it. It's very sweet.) And usually, they manage to make life, well, easier.

Geez, this sounds like an endorsement, which I don't want it to be. I'm really just trying to explain how it works.

- by Francis S.

So we spent last night with The Boys - A.'s boyfriend the photographer, the music producer and the t.v. producer. The hit of the evening was definitely the water pipe purchased from Beirut Cafe on Friday by the husband in honor of our quitting smoking. This water pipe comes with strange apple-scented tobacco pellets that throw off sparks like a tiny firecracker when you first light them, and the smoke itself is curiously benign. Although the whole smoke-on-the-water thing gave me some weird uncontrollable flashbacks to the drug-hazed days of my last two years of high school. Well, maybe not real flashbacks, but close enough. Yee-haw.

We got to hear about how the music producer got his start - he was 14 and took the train into the city from suburban Sollentuna and saw these boys breakdancing at Sergelstorg and after watching for three hours, he told them he wanted to be their manager. ''They went through all the one-crown coins and ten crown notes and shit that people dropped, and I got 10 percent of everything'' - and other exploits of his early youth - ''I was coming home at like 7 or 8 or 9 from some fucking party one night when I was 18 and I saw Expressen and on the cover there was some shit in big fucking letters about these guys who ripped all these teenagers off and I bought a copy and I looked inside it was all pictures of, like, me but with my face covered by a black dot and shit.'' He explained to us that he hadn't ripped anyone off, but he signed some paper for someone else who did rip everyone off. ''I never trusted the media after that,'' he said.

He also talked about how it shocked him when he went to Africa for Unicef. It was because one of his stars is involved with Unicef. What disturbed him was how he had always thought of them as the good guys but here they were, spending a lot of money entertaining them when the people in the surrounding villages were so desperately poor. ''And they had all this data, how many children, how many had HIV, how many died. They knew every fucking thing about statistics,'' he said. It made him feel that they were doing just enough to help a bit, but not really more than that. He wondered if they were really just trying to control the population.

''That sounds like a conspiracy theory,'' I said. Not that they probably aren't trying to control the population. I just don't believe it's a conspiracy. And of course I'm used to thinking of Unicef as some great benevolent organization as well.

''Yeah, maybe,'' he said. I guess I can't be too hard on anyone for believing in some conspiracies because in fact some very underhanded things have happened that I would say fit into the category of conspiracy. Besides, I like this guy, he's funny and he's smart and some of this stuff he's just throwing out on the table just to get us all talking at the top of our voices.

And thus began a long evening of talk about America, money, who runs the world, and other things. ''Like the fact that the U.S. is more like a big corporation than a country,'' the music producer said.

And of course this quickly degenerated into a discussion of what the hell is going on with this so-called war on terrorism, and what's going to happen next and why. It's amazing how a night's entertainment is no longer complete without touching on the topic, no matter how frustrated everyone feels afterward.

Me, I don't know what the hell I think anymore, other than not really trusting people to do the right thing.

The Swedish word for the day is samtal. It means conversation.

- by Francis S.

Happy Swedish Halloween.

We're celebrating by having a boy's night out - the husband, A.'s boyfriend the photographer, the music producer, the t.v. producer and me.

Actually, last night was a boy's night out for me also, for that matter - I met G. for, uh, six beers at a Czech restaurant a couple blocks from the apartment and he told me all about getting down on his knee in a dingy hotel room in London to ask his girlfriend to marry him and now she wants to get married in the hotel made of ice up in Jukkasjärvi, a 20-hour long but romantic train ride from here.

I'd never really heard of the concept of a boy's night out before. A tjejmiddagen, a girl's night out, is quite the popular thing here, but I'd never heard of a boy's night out.

- by Francis S.

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl, "Tu-whit,
Tu-who!" a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl, "Tu-whit,
Tu-who!" a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
(Love's Labour's Lost, 5.2.908-25)

My mother used to recite this.

Oh, it feels like winter to me, and the thermometer hasn't even hit zero yet. Å. just came back from Tampere, though, and it snowed all day there yesterday.

The Swedish word for the day is skitkallt. It means fucking cold.

- by Francis S.

What is your family like?

My family, well, I've always secretly been vaguely ashamed that my family is so wholesome, so happy with each other, so lacking in neuroses. Of course, when I started therapy after I split with my ex, I found myself talking not about him or my relationship, but about my family. They definitely have their faults. But on the whole, they could be described as Waltonian. Although my ex's own therapist, who had never met me nor my family, described us as ''having an agenda of narcissistic entitlement,'' which my ex dutifully reported back to me. I responded with annoyance by writing a rather bad poem. I'm at a loss as to what that says about my relationship with my ex. And his own family was a frightening combination of New York City Aggressive-Aggression (as opposed to passive aggression) married to honest-to-goodness Southern Gothic Nuttiness straight out of Flannery O'Connor. They were not a healthy set of people.

But, getting back to the subject of families, the family in which I grew up - as opposed to my post-nuclear family, the one that includes my husband and myself - consists of six persons, including me.

There is my father the engineer, a stoical man of 67, who I remember as being infinitely patient when I was a boy. In later life, he has unfortunately developed a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder and, like a shark, dies if he stops moving. Or rather, falls asleep. He is now Mr. Hyper Project Guy, and it's very hard to get him to focus on anything outside of his current projects. These are rather substantial, to give him credit, such as being in charge of building a house for Habitat for Humanity. He is most lovable.

Then there is my mother, who married my father when both of them were 21. They started dating when they were 15. They still seem to be happily married, for the most part. This is probably a key part of the whole Waltonian element to the family. My mother is a nurse. She has calmed down considerably from the Mom I remember as a boy, who was a touch on the, er, angry side sometimes. Like my father, she believes that action is very important. My parents were not too keen on the whole gay thing when they found out about me when I was 18 (I'm not going to tell you that story). But, over the years, they've changed a bit, and they happened to be living in Colorado when that whole nasty Proposition 2 thing was going down, which politicized the both of them. So my mother is big into gay rights. She is currently organizing a P-FLAG organization in Oak Park, Illinois (I was rather surprised to hear that there was none in existance).

Then there is my older sister, who is a saint in all the best senses of that word. Just one examle of this would be that when I was five, I wanted a Barbie Doll for Christmas (yeah, yeah, no comment, I had to work hard to shed my girly-boy image as time went on) and my mother, who found this a threat to her masculinity, was not pleased. My sister, who was only eight at the time, defied my mother and got me one. And that is why I am the person I am today. Right. Well, actually, there is a great deal of truth to that statement.

Next is me, the oldest of The Boys.

Then comes my younger brother (as opposed to my little brother). My younger brother is only a year and a half younger than me, and was always a year behind me in school. We never fought much, not really. He's an engineer like my father, only he's much smarter. Not wiser, but smarter. And he was wild when we were teenagers. He always did his homework, but he most definitely was wild. For instance, the school newspaper did a survey on drugtaking in our school - this would have been 1979 or so - and one of the classes they surveyed was the Calculus class. The results of that test went something like this:

• Percentage of people who have tried marijuana: 15% (which included my brother)
  
• Percentage of people who have tried hallucinigenic drugs: 3.2% (which included only my brother)
  
• Percentage of people who have tried cocaine: 3.2% (my brother)
  
• Percentage of people who have tried amphetimines: 3.2% (my brother)
  
• Percentage of people who have tried barbiturates: 3.2% (uh, guess who?)

Of course now he's married and has three kids and lives across the street, but directly across the street from my parents, is a VP at some big consulting firm, and plays golf with his 10-year-old daughter and my dad every Saturday, weather permitting.

Finally, there is my little brother. He is not littler than me. He is five years younger, but he has been bigger than me since he was about 13. Then again, I was a scrawny guy for years. Those were the good old days. He was always the most handsome, the most popular, the nicest guy who had one steady girlfriend after another from the time he was 10. We weren't particularly close. Strangely enough, we are quite close now. And he's changed a lot from when he was 13. He's a lot more shy these days, even if he does dress up as Hedwig for halloween, he's had his ups and downs. He's getting married to a friend of mine that he met when he was here in Sweden for my wedding. He's moved to Washington to be with her - it's funny to think that he's now living where I lived for so long. I wish he lived here, though. It would be awfully nice to just see him whenever I wanted.

So that is my family. And we mostly get along, although we do drive our various spouses crazy when they are unlucky enough to be with us when we are all together. We basically like to sit around and laugh at each others' stupid jokes, tell stupid stories, teach the next generation how to tell stupid jokes and stories, and generally just loaf about.

I suppose part of why we do get along is that we don't, mostly, live near each other. We take each other in infrequent overdoses.

And now I'm wondering if I just haven't given support to Tolstoy's comment about all happy families being alike, i.e. not worth writing about.

The Swedish word for the day is tråkigt. It means boring.

- by Francis S.

Fall has descended so rapidly, all wet leaves on the ground and dark by 4:30. It happens quickly this far north, I suppose. For some reason, it made me pull out a CD of Britten's Ceremony of Carols. Probably because it would have been about this time of year that the choir I sang in as a boy would have begun our preparations for Christmas in earnest.

I had a nice clear soprano when I was 10. It has deteriorated into a gravelly bass that gets even deeper if I smoke too much. No more (nearly) effortless high Cs for for me anymore, no more solos ("Dark midnight was my cry, dark midnight was my cry, dark midnight was my cra-a-ahy... give me Jesus. Give me Jesus, give me Je-e-sus! You may have all this world." - it sounds dreadfully like melodramatic and bad religion, but it was such a bittersweet and moving spiritual.) I can still more than hold my part in a group, though.

This choir that I sang in as a boy was undoubtedly the high point of my life for a good five years. It was small - 15 or so voices - but choice. And the director, oh, the director, he was my favorite adult in all the world and I loved him. Joe Brewer was his name.

He called us all "young man" and "young lady." A black man, he was rather an anomaly in the presbyterian church I grew up in. The church itself was an anomaly, situated in what was then a mostly Jewish suburb of Chicago.

He was a consummate musician and taught me how to love music, what to love about it, what good music was. We sang everything from Orlando di Lasso and Heinrich Schutz to Michael Haydn to Zoltan Kodaly.

And he also taught us spirituals wherein instead of learning the music by reading it, we listened to him sing our parts and we then sang it back to him until we got it right, and he would accompany us with a rip-roaring gospel piano.

He was my great boyhood role model - he died nearly 15 years ago or so, when he was only 50. They said it was a heart attack, but I sometimes wonder if it was AIDS, because though I never knew it when I was a boy, he was gay. He lived with his boyfriend, a trumpet player, in Lincoln Park in Chicago. The whole choir visited him there once. I'm sure my parents must have known. He came over to our house for dinner several times, including one time where my father was renovating the dining room and we had written with magic markers all over the walls. He signed his name, ''Giovanni Brewer.''

He was so interested in us, so firm and kind, so vivacious and tough, small but muscular and athletic, wearing the red sweater we gave him one year for Christmas.

Thinking of him gives me a great sense of longing and loss - the loss of my once beautiful voice, of my childhood, of him. But thinking of Joe Brewer mostly makes me smile.

- by Francis S.