How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

Peer pressure combined with the Calvinist version of guilt - "God frowns on a man who shirks his duty" - have an unfortunate effect on me. Just tag me for a meme, and I can't sleep at night if I fail to respond.

So, the somewhat mysteriously named "xoom" has pushed my buttons, asking me to write five things you don't know about me. I'm not sure I can really take this to the limit, since by this point everyone from my parents to random unknown people at my office read this, which means it's pretty hard to come up with things that no person who reads this doesn't know about me. So I'll stick to things that, as far as I can remember, I've never mentioned in the five plus years I've been rambling on in this particular corner of the digital world.

1. I don't like beets. I try to like them, I even eat them pretty much whenever they're put on the table. But the consistency is like biting into layers of boiled crayons. And the color should be pleasing, but it's not.

2. I am the biggest baby about someone sticking me to get blood. Whenever I have to have a blood test, I need to lie down because if I don't, I am in serious danger of fainting. I've fainted three times when I was sitting up and actually almost fainted once when I was lying down. The nurse had to peel the paper off my back when I finally sat up from the examining table, because I'd sweat so much.

3. I haven't voted in the last two U.S. presidential elections. I have a good excuse, though. I'm registered in the District of Columbia, so it doesn't make a bit of difference, since Washington is like 90 percent Democratic, so the electoral college votes always go to the Democrats. And I don't even have a representative in either houses of Congress, so why should I bother? On top of that, Congress is always being nasty and manipulative, using the poor District of Columbia as an ideological punching bag, forcing the city to spend money to change subway maps to reflect that National Airport was renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport (don't get me going on that one), or messing with D.C.'s handgun ban, for example. Still, this is all just an excuse and even if my vote makes no difference, I feel guilty about this (see note above). But not so guilty that I've bothered to get an absentee ballot.

4. If I had been born a girl, my parents would have named me Mary Ann. And they're not even Catholic. Go figure.

5. My husband keeps bugging me to renew my Swedish ID, which is expired but I use anyway. For some reason I keep putting this off. I don't even know why. It makes him so crazy he won't even talk about it.

I've never been very into passing on chain letters, so the buck is going to stop here on this one. Sorry, xoom.

The Swedish word for the day is fem. It means five.

- by Francis S.