How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

2011-10-15T10:06:00.004+02:00

Nearly a year has gone by since I've written anything here. Real life seems to have taken over, any new lessons to add to the more than a thousand already here left undocumented. Maybe it's because the Swedish language has at last become truly embedded in my life, I've conquered it about as much as I'm going to - I still hear myself make mistakes, I have my pat expressions I use over and over, and my accent is still far from perfect (for some strange reason when I speak Swedish, people invariably think that I'm a Brit, what's that all about?), but Swedish pretty much pours out of my mouth effortlessly. Has that made it harder to blog? Or is it that I feel like I'm repeating myself, I have nothing new to say after 1,004 posts? Is it that at heart I'm a lazy bastard? Or that I want to put my energies into a real book?

At any rate, I'm not ready to throw in the towel, despite a year of not blogging here. I've gotten too much out of it - great friends, even my current job - to quit just yet.

The question is: How do I get the motivation back?

(Apologies for the metablogging. I hate metablogging, mostly).

The Swedish word for the day is lektioner. It means lessons.

2010-10-18T23:00:00.002+02:00

They poured themselves through the door at 6:30, bearing gin and vermouth and game. "He was such a bore," M. the cameraman said. "But he's dead now." It was A. the TV producer and her boyfriend, come early to prepare the main course: wild boar.

Ha ha, I said.

The guests - best friends of M., mostly TV people and a guy with a sock company - were due at 8:00, so there wasn't a minute to spare. And of course I'd done my bit much earlier - American apple pie (as opposed to Swedish apple pie, which just goes to show you that apple pie isn't particularly American at all, really. It was probably the French who invented it) and homemade cinnamon ice cream. So we had to sear big chunks of boar, and chop carrots and onions and parsnips, and pour cans and cans of tomatoes, and add red wine and sage and rosemary and cep mushrooms. The kitchen was, briefly, a hurricane, and all that boar-searing generated a lot of smoke so we had to open wide the window in the kitchen and open the balcony door in the living room. But it all turned out in the end.

Everyone arrived more or less eight-ish, and they were duly impressed by the apartment, and they drank martinis and yakked it up, and then sat obediently to dinner (all except the baby, who slept in his baby carriage in the spare bedroom). They ate the boar and the pie, and a few of them showed off their tattoos (strange collections of tiny drawings - half-hearts, pirates and parrots, a tiny bottle). Then the guy who is supposedly the best video editor in all of Stockholm and who has a thing for calves (not the animal, the body part) examined all of our legs. Apparently, for a calf-fetishist, long and muscular is the thing. Mine are pleasingly long, but he claimed he'd never seen such an unmuscular calf. For which I felt duly insulted. Unmuscular indeed. I should have stuck my heel up and pressed on my toe. But then, he really only likes women's calves anyway.

They left at 2 a.m. or so, leaving us with dirty dishes and probably a good 5 pounds worth of wild boar stew.

Good thing it tastes better warmed over.

The Swedish word for the day is vildsvin, which of course means wild boar.

2010-10-15T00:58:00.003+02:00

Quick plug for the new project: queercult interviews Linas Alsenas, author of Gay America: The Struggle for Equality. He says he wouldn't mind meeting Emma Goldman, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde... and Larry Kramer and Ellen DeGeneres. I think he's got a chance with the last two. Check it out here.

The Swedish word for the day is författare. It means author.

2010-09-30T22:48:00.003+02:00

I've contemplated giving this up, since I've reached the thousand mark. But despite my barely posting once a month, I can't quite do it. Which hasn't stopped me from starting up something new: queercult. It's all about pre-Stonewall gay esoterica. Check it out and let me know what you think. It's just the beginning...

The Swedish word for the day is projekt. It means project, of course.

2010-08-29T10:56:00.004+02:00

We spent the day - an idyllic late-August day, late-August being unabashedly full-on autumn here in Stockholm - wandering around the south island of the city, almost aimlessly. We ran into a range of random friends and acquaintances, making plans to meet up next week or in some nameless future. We ordered tile for the bathroom and bought an old LP at Pet Sounds, the cover a black and white photo of Ray Bourbon in full drag leering at a couple of sailors, circa 1950. We had Chinese food, and we went to see La Danse, which has been playing forever at the Grand.

The thing was, though, that before the movie they showed a trailer for Mao's Last Dancer - another dance movie, so it was appropriate. Except the trailer left such a bad taste in my mouth. It made the movie seem as if it was all about how repressive and demanding China was in comparison to wonderful, glorious, free America. As if it were trying to capture an America that used to be, since we've lost our luster of late. It seemed so very nationalistic. Somehow so very tasteless, to be presenting America as a shining beacon of freedom, when it's so mired in partisanship right now that politicians would rather let the ship go down in flames than work together to actually try to work together to fix the mess they've made.

At least the actual movie was good - in usual Frederick Wiseman style, the narrative is oblique and I can imagine many people might find it too aimless. But not us, we all marveled at what life is like at the Paris Opera Ballet.

And that's what I'm thinking today, as I write this, my thousandth post.

There, you've gotten your thousand difficult lessons! Now, how is your Swedish?

The Swedish word for the day is inlägg. It means post.

2010-07-25T15:46:00.003+02:00

They stood at the elbow of the bus - you know the part I'm talking about, the part where the back end is joined to the front on those extra long buses, which are blue in the city. But out in the far suburbs, the extra-long buses are red like all the other buses. The husband and I were on our way back from his great niece's fifth birthday, sitting and sweating in the back and watching the two boys in the bus's elbow.

They were somewhere between 20 and 24. The shorter one, with his wide smile and perfect white teeth, was in love with the taller one. Anyone could see it. The way he couldn't take his eyes away from the taller boy's face. The way he straightened the taller boy's collar. The way he kept moving his hand on the hand grip so that his fingers were touching the taller boy's fingers. It was all he could do not to hold onto the taller boy.

I sat in my seat and smiled wistfully. I'm surrounded day in and day out by straight people who very visibly show they are in love. They don't have to think twice about it. But for a great big homo like me to show I'm in love becomes a huge statement. So I don't do it, and neither does anyone else in Sweden, not really. So to see my own life reflected in those two boys, it tugs at my heart, and I'm enraptured.

Did you see those boys, I asked the husband as we got off the bus.

"Yes," he said, smiling at me. "I think the one guy liked the other guy more. We're almost home, thank god."

The Swedish phrase for the day is ett par. It means a couple.

2010-06-03T11:05:00.001+02:00

Spring has been so late in arriving after the long hard winter. Not that I'm complaining really, I'm all for a long hard winter. It's how I grew up. But still, it felt a mite miraculous to drive out of the city, into rolling hills and past a long thin lake, and further, to the pop star's country house.

Oh, the green - when the tree doctor came to look at the trees, he told us that the grass had grown six inches in a week - and the lilacs, as late as I've ever seen them, lining the country lane and making me think of my mother, who come spring always had a vase of lilacs on the kitchen table in an old jade-colored ceramic pitcher from the thirties.

So the pop star drove her rider mower madly about the lawn, like a cowboy, like some vision out of the American suburbs I grew up in - the grass was more than a foot high. While I made rhubarb cream - which is just stewed rhubarb with a bit of sugar and a pinch of potato starch to thicken it - one of those beloved Swedish treats that you serve warm with milk poured over it, a reminder of how poor the country was until relatively recent (and how hard it is to grow anything up here in the far north - you get far enough north and there are no fruit trees, so strawberries, raspberries and rhubarb are about all you've got to work with.)

Then we walked down the road, past the peculiar Scottish cows with their wooly hides and broad faces and curly horns, and turned down a path.

"This is what I wanted to show you," said the pop star. "This tree is a thousand years old, the oldest one around. Can you believe it? It's beautiful!"

Apparently everyone around knew about the thousand-year-old oak. (Just think, it was around when the Vikings were still rampaging, and Sweden was still a century away from official christianization.) A fairly large branch - as big as a tree itself - had fallen not so long ago, but otherwise it looked fairly healthy. The four of us - me, the husband, the pop star and the girl from L.A. - tried to reach around the tree, holding hands, but it was too big.

"Look up," said the girl from L.A., gazing into the branches above us. "it is beautiful, really, really."

The Swedish word for the day is ek. It means oak.

2010-05-29T18:20:00.000+02:00

Have you ever been to Monte Carlo?

It's about what you'd imagine: yachts in the harbor, the Hotel de Paris with tourists snapping photos, not nearly enough cabs because everyone has a car and driver.

We were there for a wedding, though - the sister of A. the TV producer - and we got the full treatment, since the bride and groom live with their daughter there, in that little principality where gamblers foot the government bills instead of citizens paying taxes. A wedding complete with Swedish parson (although the church was Anglican), champagne on a long jetty carpeted in white, a dinner of six courses including a cake that turned out to be macarons, macarons and more macarons, peonies and roses and lilies and freesia enough to cover a field in Holland. And dancing wildly into the wee hours, lesbian photographers who were a couple, both named Emilie, neither of whom really spoke English taking pictures that I will be most curious to see.

Then there was the lunch the next day for everyone with gallons of rosé wine at beach a boat ride away from the harbor. And then dinner all over again, in a club with more champagne and fish and vodka and dancing wildly yet again, not realizing until later that that was no DJ playing cool covers, it was a real-live woman singing.

(Did I mention the call girls in the club? Russians in one room, Brazilians in another. Didn't hear of any rent boys though. Oh, and then there were the awful names on the yachts: The One and Solid Gold. But really, what can one expect? The place is all about conspicuous consumption.)

It was the most luxurious kind of exhaustion you can possibly imagine. And the best way to get to know the very strange place that Monte Carlo is.

The Swedish word for the day is skumpa. It means bubbly - as in champagne.

2010-04-30T12:29:00.005+02:00

As I sat at my desk, writing blissfully away about iPad apps - or was it tips for getting into shape for the summer? - my phone rang.

It was my friend the former punk rocker.

"Sarah Waters was here and I hugged her and gave her a book!" she said breathlessly into the phone. "I feel like one of those crazy fans."

It turns out that the author of one of my favorite books, Fingersmith, was in town for a special reading at Kulturhuset, and the former punk rocker's daughter not only went, she managed to get a 45-minute private interview with Waters for her blog Bookleaf.se. And of course she mentioned that she works at the Science Fiction Book Shop and that Waters should really check it out.

So my friend the former punk rocker, who is one of the managers there, wasn't completely surprised to see Sarah Waters wander into the store. But she did lose her cool - but only in the best way, all gushing and full of admiration.

"I'm a huge fan of yours," she told Sarah. "And I know you haven't read this and I think you'd like it, it's by John Ajvide Lindqvist, it's Let the Right One In. It's a present from me because you've given me so much because I love all of your books."

Sarah apparently is very kind and gracious and is completely unruffled by gushing fans.

"And you're the one who turned me on to her, " the former punk rocker said to me. "So I just had to tell you!"

I only wish that I had been there to gush, too.

The Swedish phrase for the day is förtjust i, which means to have a crush on.

2010-03-29T23:41:00.000+02:00

And the ticker goes up a notch in the bio at the left. One more year to half a century.

The Swedish word for the day is fyrtionio. It mean forty-nine.

2010-03-27T16:46:00.004+01:00

At last the ice has melted out by Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen, the ducks and coots and swans swimming and diving. Quite different from three weeks ago, when we took one of the ships overnight to Åland with the children's book author, the sea captain and the Australians.

Because of the unusually cold winter, the Baltic was all iced over and we wanted to see what it looked like out on the open sea. Of course the day before we left, some 50 boats had gotten stuck fast in the ice. But the sea captain assured us that we wouldn't get stuck.

"The boat is too big," he said. "It's made for seas full of ice like that. Besides, they wouldn't let us go if we were going to get stuck."

So on Friday afternoon, we boarded the boat with several hundred teenagers, bound for the island of Åland, which is all of 85 miles from Stockholm.

We took a look at our cabins, which were actually kind of charming with their round portholes and all the wooden detailing. Then we walked around the boat, checking out the tiny little pool, the various restaurants and the casino (well, slot machines anyway), the nightclub and the bar, where we had drinks and watched the city lights disappearing behind us.

We had dinner at about 8:30 or so, and about 9:15, as we were deciding whether or not to have dessert, an announcement came on the intercom telling us that due to recommendations from the authorities, we would not be going to Mariehamn in Åland for fear of getting stuck in the ice. The captain had set anchor and we would be spending the night where we were, returning to Stockholm the next afternoon.

"What?" we said all together.

You promised us we wouldn't get stuck, I said to the sea captain.

"We aren't stuck!" he tried to claim.

We were all terribly disappointed - and probably the only people on the whole boat who even cared since most people were there just for the cheap liquor. In fact, we were probably the only people who even noticed.

The next morning, when we got up, the sun was nearly blinding on the ice, and even if it wasn't the open sea, it was spectacular and terribly arctic.

As we looked out onto the snowy islands in the distance on either side, with people walking on the ice in between, I realized we were just outside Birds Island, where I've spent many a summer day. I could even see the very rocks where I sit every day at about 9:30 a.m., midway through my morning constitutional. In fact, if we'd wanted to, the husband and I could've actually gotten down off the boat and walked over the solid ice and spent the night there. If we'd wanted to.

Dammit. There I was, no further out in the archipelago than I'd ever been.

The Swedish word for the day is en förbannelse. It means a curse.

2010-02-18T21:40:00.002+01:00

I dreamt I was pregnant. About three months pregnant, and I could feel the little fetus in me, a hard little knot twirling around in my gut. It was so strange, but a good thing. And then suddenly it was gone.I think it was a dream in sympathy with a friend who just had a miscarriage.

Or does it mean something else?

Do other men ever dream they are pregnant? Men whose wives aren't pregnant, I mean, which I imagine is common... or is it?

The Swedish word for the day is gravid. It means pregnant.

2010-02-06T18:04:00.003+01:00

We stood in line to get on the bus to take us out on the tarmac at the airport on Gran Canaria - the Canary Islands sound so exotic to us Americans, who rarely know that they are the southernmost outpost of the European Union (though geographically they're part of Africa, sitting 100 kilometers west of Morocco) and the only part of the EU with guaranteed January temperatures in the 70s (Fahrenheit) and an ocean warm enough to swim in. Gran Canaria is a tourist trap, but a glorious one - long and wide beaches with pale sand blown over from the Sahara mixed with black volcanic sand, rugged mountains, even an old colonial capital with a certain charm. I guess the Canary Islands are Europe's equivalent to Florida. (Strangely enough, in tacky Playa del Inglés where we were staying, there is a shopping mall with sleepy little souvenir shops during the day and something like 20 gay bars at night - drag shows and leather bars and discos and pubs where they played show tunes. WTF? Fun, though...)

Anyway, we were standing in line, the husband, the children's book author, the sea captain and I, when a drunken bearded Swede started talking to the children's book author.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"How long have you been in Sweden?" he asked.

"What do you do for a living?" he asked.

"Do you have a condom?" he asked.

He told the children's book author he wanted to jerk off in the bathroom and didn't want to make a mess. He said he wanted to join the mile-high club. The children's book author didn't tell him that the mile-high club takes two - mere masturbation doesn't count towards membership.

Then he told the children's book author that he was very drunk because he's terrified of flying, and his girlfriend would be furious because he did crazy things when he was drunk.

"I have to pee really bad but I have VD so it really hurts," he told the children's book author.

All this in two minutes as we waited for the bus to take us onto the tarmac and to the plane that would take us back to Stockholm.

Once we got on the plane, the children's book author saw him go to the bathroom before we took off, and we tried not to think of him jerking off, or peeing painfully. A stewardess finally had to open the door to get him out, and the children's book author saw her brief look of disgust. "Don't use the bathroom on the left," he warned me.

When we got back to Stockholm, there was a foot of snow on the ground and it was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

"We should never go without a sunny and warm vacation in the winter ever again," the husband said to me.

Home, snowy home.

The Swedish word for the day is charterresa. It means charter trip.

2010-01-10T00:14:00.003+01:00

Christmas has been swept out the door at last: the smell of oranges, cloves, saffron buns and sage stuffing, of hyacinth, pine branches and cold winter air, the glitter of glass and metal-filagree ornaments, the guests and the wrapping paper and finally, the tree all rolled up in a sheet, just like the victim it is, hauled out and dumped into the little plaza outside the city library with a bunch of other trees in various states of needledom.

It was the most yulish of Christmases in years: house guests for weeks, lots of dinners, lots of snow. Just the way I like it. And then we jaunted off to Oslo for a long weekend, where it was just as cold and snowy, and we hiked up and down icy hills all through the town, then had a glorious five-hour dinner fixed by a Frenchman and we danced in the new year, sweating and laughing in our fine clothes, swigging champagne until it was too much for me, and I had to go to sleep at 4:30, or was it 5:00?

But taking a long promenade through Stockholm today, after we'd taken down the tree, in the 2:30 p.m. dusk, with all the lights glittering in the windows and people walking on the ice of Lake Mälaren off of Kungsholmen and parents pushing their children in sleds down snowy hills in parks and a lone ferry making its way through the ice out into Stockholm Harbor, I realized: I miss having real winters. It seems to never get very cold, and we're lucky to have a total of two weeks of snow from the end of November to the middle of April. Strange to think that we are so far north, and yet it's a far milder climate than in Chicago. The truth of it is, the snow and cold make me happy.

So, how long will it last?

We've had nearly a month of it already. More than our fair share, it seems.

I'm keeping my cold fingers crossed.

The Swedish word for the day is vintertid. It means wintertime.

2009-12-10T08:19:00.001+01:00

Are 21st century Americans the New Victorians?

A culture inordinately influenced by a wacked view of Christianity that values censure over love, exclusion over generosity and generally is mostly concerned about extending its power to control people’s lives? Check.

A squeamish prudery when it comes to the realities of sex? Check.

A belief that the country is not only blest by, um, “God” – but the country has the God-given right and duty to exert control over the rest of the world? Check.

A blind faith in the progress of business and industry – what’s good for business is good for the individual – yet science (read: evolution) is suspect? Check.

“Victorian” has always been a pejorative adjective in my books. I learned that from my mother and father, I suppose: my grandparents, three of whom were born when Queen Victoria was still alive (only my father’s father was born after her death), all suffered one way or another due to the Victorian values that they carried with them until they died. To me, Victorian means self-righteous, smugly pious, inhibited and stifling.

What brings this whole, well, facile comparison to mind is a recent reading of A.S. Byatt’s curious The Children’s Book, which puts a different spin on the original Victorians, (including a faddish adult love of children’s literature with one of the main characters a sort of less-successful 19th century J.K. Rowling I’d say). The book is all about Fabians and syndicalists, medievalists and suffragists, social reformers all. Victorian England wasn’t just a time of moral hypocrisy, it was a time of great upheaval. Which I suppose is true of our time as well. Although at this very moment, what’s happening in America regarding that issue closest to my heart, gay rights, makes me inclined to think that the moral hypocrites are winning.

Feh.

Will people look back a hundred years from now and think of us Americans the way I think of the 19th century English?

The Swedish word for the day is förträngning. It means repression.

2009-11-16T08:01:00.000+01:00

If I lived close by, I would be a doting uncle. Or if I had lived close by when my nieces and nephews were little kids. Which most of them are not anymore. Take my oldest niece, of whom I am inordinately proud (well, I'm proud of all of my nieces and nephews - the cleverest, funniest, handsomest, prettiest, kindest and strongest kids in the world). My oldest niece has always had a will of her own, even from the time I first met her when she was only six weeks old and without even crying, she exerted an iron control over both her parents.

Anyway, instead of going to college when she turned 18, my niece decided to go to Bhopal, India for seven months, volunteering (inspired no doubt by my parents, who are the biggest do-gooders I know) with the community there that is still suffering the after-effects of a terrible disaster when a Union Carbide factory blew up. She's written about going inside the long-abandoned factory - a disturbing tale - and about the difficulty in getting proper compensation from Dow Chemical (which owns Union Carbide) for those in Bhopal still affected by the explosion.

And now, my niece wants me to get the word out that this week in Stockholm you can learn more about how to help at the Bhopal Bus (times and places at the link), a traveling informational exhibition manned by volunteers trying to raise awareness of the tragedy, which happened 25 years ago.

So, this one's for you, my dear niece. May you succeed in making the world a better place.

The Swedish word for the day is katastrof. It means catastrophe.

2009-10-17T17:15:00.001+02:00

I'm on youtube.

2009-10-11T10:25:00.002+02:00

While sitting on the train with the husband, a family got on and sat next to us, parents, teenaged stepson, and a toddler and a baby together in one of those unwieldy double strollers. I looked at the sleeping toddler's mittens: tiny, brightly colored, with a repeated design of skulls. How odd, I thought, that this memento mori has become such a popular pattern for the clothes of small children.

Was it started with irony - dress your two-year-old in goth death metal biker style with a big old wink - or is it a distant reflection of our warlike times? Or did it just filter down, with little kids demanding to have the same things that the big kids have?

More, I wonder if it gives parents pause to pull a wailing baby into a little green onesie patterned with skulls? I want to know if it feels odd to show off this squirming bundle of your genes and proof that life just goes on and on, with a nasty reminder that death gets us all in the end. I guess a hundred years ago and more, when the chances of making it to your third birthday were far slimmer than today, no one bothered with skull patterns since children were a reminder in and of themselves that death gets us all in the end.

As for today, well, we're so removed from death these days that the image of a skull is really nothing more than a fashion statement. I would be surprised if any parents gave any of this a second thought.

But it never fails to startle me.

The Swedish word for the day is ben. It means bone or bones as well as leg or legs.

2009-10-10T12:40:00.003+02:00

We went to see Julie & Julia last night with the girl from LA and her boyfriend. The movie opened yesterday here up in the far north. As every person I've spoken to, every review I've read, says: Julia good; Julie, um, not so good. But the husband came back from the gym this morning and I caught him in the kitchen, making an omelet, Julia-style, shaking, shaking, shaking it in the pan.

"It didn't really work" he said. "I did it wrong at the beginning so it stuck."

Plus he put tabasco sauce on it, decidedly un-Julia.

"It's good anyway," he said.

The Swedish word for the day is omelett, which surprisingly means omelet. An interesting fact, however is that when Swedes want a smile for the camera, they say "omelet," which gives a decidedly more subtle and less radiator-grill-like result.

2009-10-02T07:57:00.004+02:00

How old is too old to be out dancing until 4 a.m.?

I am proof in the flesh that 48 is not too old. And we are not talking wimpy dancing, either. I got all sweaty and soaked, in my t-shirt and green suspenders, shaking every part of my body hard and fast.

We were just coming off of a dinner of saffron curry chicken and fried bread and homemade coconut ice cream with cardamom caramel sauce for dessert. Not so heavy going, despite the sound of it. The girl from L.A. had at last moved to Stockholm (well, not at last – she’d been here for a month but we were all absorbed in marrying off the children’s book author and the sea captain) so we were celebrating.

“Welcome,” the husband toasted to her and her boyfriend, and all 11 of us raised our glasses. "Here's to the first of many dinners."

Absolutely, I thought to myself.

So we talked and ate, each group having its own conversations, discussing everything from Maira Kalman - the girl from L.A. went to a knitted hat party at her house! - to getting lost in the Ikea at Kungens Kurva, and the insanity that is shopping at Ikea on a Saturday, to the stripey goodness of her boyfriend's socks (I forced him to come and look at all our stripey socks in the newly refurbished dressing room at the back of the apartment.)

Then, at about 12:30, we all put on our coats and trooped out to go to some club where the pop star was playing, except when we got there push had come to shove, shove, shove as we stood around listening to the tunes being spun, being so manhandled and elbowed by the crowd that our little group nearly imploded.

"Someone pinched my ass," the boyfriend of the girl from L.A. said.

"Was that you, Francis?" the children's book author said.

I denied it.

"Well, I wouldn't have minded if it was Francis, at least I know him," the boyfriend of the girl from L.A. said.

Then some girl tried to pick him up. That is totally un-Swedish I said. I told him it must be his naturally curly hair that was attracting all the attention. Then we left for some new gay club that's opened up, near Norrlandsgatan. Push had not come to shove there, thank goodness. Push hadn't even come to push yet, although at least one of the dance floors was pleasantly packed. It was there that we ended the night.

The Swedish phrase for the day is klockan fyra på morgonen. It means four in the morning.

2009-08-16T13:47:00.003+02:00

When we rushed into the liquor store down the street - Sweden's alcohol monopoly Systembolaget, of course - I scoffed at the husband for buying six bottles of South African shiraz. Then when La Francaise, who is visiting from Oslo with her husband, the Belgian, insisted on paying for the bottles, I told her that's not fair to her since we'd never end up drinking all the bottles at the upcoming dinner. We're only seven, I reminded her.

Silly me.

We're all borderline alcoholics in this country, and I guess we needed all six bottles, plus one purchased the previous day, to wash down the turkey molé I made (the easy version, which only took three hours. I hate to imagine how much time and effort it takes to make the Mexican classic chili pepper and chocolate sauce that is authentic molé), rice and beans and fried plantains and avocado-with-fresh-corn salad.

Somehow, towards the end of the meal, after the coffee and the homemade dulce de leche ice cream, the children's book author and La Francaise and I got onto the subject of song lyrics. The question was: What exactly are good song lyrics?

"You know," said La Francaise, "It sounds really weird but sometimes I like Eminem. You know that song about his mother and cleaning out his closet? The lyrics are really good."

The children's book author nodded. "I think "If I were a Boy." It's actually pretty deep when you think about it. Beyoncé. She's hot."

I was smart enough not to actually do it, but I came dangerously close to saying that in the old days, lyrics were better.

What about "Both Sides Now," I asked. Can you recite any of the lyrics to Beyoncé or Eminem? I think you should be able to recite good lyrics word for word, I said. And I proceeded: Flows and flows of angel's hair, and ice cream castles in the air, and feather canyons everywhere...

I think I botched the lyrics about then, but neither La Francaise nor the children's book author noticed.

"Sure, but that's folk music," the children's book author said. "It's all about the words and they're so sing-songy."

Folk music? Joni Mitchell, a folk musician? I was aghast. But really, I couldn't accurately describe her music, other than to say that it was pop music when it came out at least, in the early 1970s.

The children's book author wasn't buying it.

"Folk," he said. "She's folk. You can't convince me."

And really, I couldn't.

Was it the bottle of wine I'd consumed?

But I found myself wondering, what exactly is wrong with folk music anyway? Why do I bristle at someone describing Joni Mitchell that way? When did folk musician become such a horrible way to describe someone? When did folk become a dirty word?

And the big question remained unanswered: How do you define good song lyrics?

The Swedish phrase for the day is en flaska per person. It means one bottle per person.

p.s. for Swedish readers and those wanting to test just how much Swedish they've actually learned here the hard way, I've been interviewed briefly by Micke for the gay blog aggregator site www.gaybloggar.se.

2009-07-20T12:15:00.002+02:00

I always consider myself to be in fair health, psychologically speaking. Just enough angst to not be terribly lazy. High in empathy, yet not altogether unselfish. A bit stodgy around the edges but basically fairly unrepressed. I credit it to having had a pretty easy life with little in the way of trauma, all things considered.

And then I go on a binge and I realize: OCD is me.

To whit my current, um, frozen dessert obsession. I contemplated buying an ice cream freezer for weeks before I finally stopped in at the nearby hardware store at lunch late last month. For dinner with C. the fashion photographer, I was determined to make rhubarb ice cream from a few stray stalks sitting in the refrigerator that needed to be used up before we went to New York.

What I didn't reckon for was that the metal canister of the machine needed to sit in the freezer for 24 hours, rather than the six hours I had until dinner time. It ought to work anyway, I told myself. But when the manufacturer says 24 hours, it turns out they really do mean 24 hours. And so we had cold rhubarb soup for dessert - creamy and delicious, with a hint of cinnamon and a little tang of sour cream, but soup nonetheless.

An inauspicious beginning, I thought, but it turned out not to be so. When we arrived in New York several days later, not only did my brother have an ice cream freezer, properly frozen, but I was able to find sour cherries in Manhattan to make sour cherry sorbet.

Then there was the night I fixed the gingery chicken and scallion pancakes for everyone - all of us adults and kids alike sitting in my brother and sister-in-law's living room - and I made pink grapefruit sorbet for dessert, which seemed vaguely Thai-ish. (Is grapefruit and crab salad Thai, or Vietnamese?)

Now I was on a scallion pancake and frozen dessert craze. Scallion pancakes with spicy cold melon soup and soba noodles, with fresh ginger ice cream for dessert, then scallion pancakes with soba noodles, with green tea ice cream for dessert, both rather delicate but, I have to admit, delicious. Oh, and at some point in there, for our friends visiting from Norway, I managed to make white nectarine sorbet, which comes out pale pink it turns out, and is best served right away to get the maximum flavor, rather than freezing it longer to make it harder.

But the upshot, really, is that sometimes being OCD is a good thing, to be honest. No one is complaining yet, that's for sure.

So, what should the next flavor be?

The Swedish word for the day is glass, which means ice cream and shouldn't be confused with glas, which means glass, as in both the material and something you drink from.

2009-07-09T14:17:00.003+02:00

O great mystery that crowded, dirty and expensive Manhattan can feel at W. 89th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue at 7:30 a.m. on a weekday summer morning so new and full of promise. All those endless leafy blocks of brownstones leading to Central Park. The park itself a green rectangle battened down and secured in place at its edges by high rises with terraces and roofs copied from French chateaus or Greek temples or Egyptian monuments or Spanish cathedrals or Roman forums. Or roofs of simple solid geometry.

I know I'm shamelessly romanticizing the place in my elitist way (easy to do as we never make it to any poorer neighborhoods), idly purchasing suspenders on the snootier end of Bleecker Street or strange white Japanese robot monkey things in Soho, or drinking tequila cocktails and talking a mile a minute with the divine Lisa Lucas in the East Village, or snarfing down delicious Chinese steamed buns filled with fatty caramelized pork at a jammed Momofuku (not to mention the short-cake-flavored ice cream) on a Tuesday night or wandering breezily around the Cloisters with my dear sister and sister-in-law and niece and nephew while the husband with his Spanish blood notes: "Every other thing was stolen from Spain it looks like!"

But really, living in New York is tight both in space and money, and in truth, full of the same drudgery as living anywhere else.

So why does it seem so exciting, so much better than anywhere else?

O great mystery that returning back from New York I somehow love Stockholm even more than when I left. Our apartment! So airy and grand and white and full of light as I sit reading on a sofa at 3:30 a.m. on account of the jetlag, the sun fully up and flooding the apartment. The streets! So rooted and charming on a human scale, never far from a glimpse of the water. The ethos! Circumspect rather than brazen with everything hanging out and in your face, elbows and tongues well-sharpened.

Still. What I wouldn't give to have both New York and Stockholm.

The Swedish phrase for the day is välkommen åter. It means, more or less, come back soon.

2009-06-18T23:50:00.003+02:00

The second pin of the two pins on which the Swedish year is wrapped - Christmas is the first - has arrived: Midsummer. Pagan holiday made half-Christian, it used to be tied to St. John's Day, which is June 24. Which would put it precisely six months after Christmas Eve, when Christmas is celebrated in Sweden. Very symmetrical, very orderly. Very Swedish.

Tomorrow we're off for the weekend, going out to the archipelago to the country house of the children's book author and the sea captain. Bearing salmon and caviar torte, strawberry rhubarb pie and 20 tiny bottles of Norwegian schnappes.

We almost always go to Birds Island for midsummer, to the country home of C. the fashion photographer and A. the TV producer. But after 14 years together, they are going their separate ways.

Strange how someone else's separation can tear one apart.

The holiday will be bittersweet, despite the strawberry rhubarb pie, even with whipped cream on the side.

The Swedish word for the day is skilsmässa. It means divorce.

2009-06-08T08:12:00.001+02:00

We were late for lunch yesterday as the husband and I left the Matteus school where we had just cast our votes for seats in the EU parliament. On our way out, a tiny old woman - in her late 80s I would say - walked up on her way in to vote, leaning heavily on a cane. Three political workers stood in front of her, one each from the Green party, the People's party and the Moderates (I would describe the People's party as, um, maybe, populist and it is part of the center-right alliance currently ruling Sweden, which is headed by the Moderates).

The old woman looked up, and barked out: "Pirate party?"

The husband and I looked at each other. The Pirate party is a brand new entity. They are interested in one thing: free file sharing on the internet.

"I guess she downloads a lot," the husband said, and we laughed.

And so the Pirate party ended up winning one of the 17 seats that Sweden has in the EU Parliament.

Oh, the power of the internets.

The Swedish word for the day is val, which has been the word of the day before. It means election. (And as Vatine has pointed out, also means choice as well as whale.)

2009-05-29T16:41:00.002+02:00

My last meal would be a crabcake. Who knew? Not me, at least not until I was confronted with Ganda's question.

The Swedish word for the day is sista måltid. It means last supper.

2009-05-21T22:49:00.004+02:00

We arrived late because it took us forever to iron our shirts - mine lavender, the husband's powder blue - and to pull on our trousers - mine khakis, the husband's black jeans - and our black suit jackets. Then we had to shove our feet into our shoes - mine marine corps black lace-up boots circa 1968, the husband's Paul Smith black trainers with those little multi-colored stripes on the sides. Then we scrambled into a taxi, which took us out to one of the la-di-da suburbs of Stockholm, where we had dinner at the only local watering hole, which was filled with people who were dressed, well, like me. Except for the shoes of course.

"It's the uniform out here," our hostess told us, as we sat drinking sancerre and eating fish.

She should know, she lives just up the road.

Everyone in the place was, like us, about to go to the same birthday party. Captains of industry they were, the movers and shakers of Stockholm: a bunch of 60-year-old white men. And their wives of course, who unlike the men were decked out in their finest dancing clothes, their heels staggering, their hair freshly colored and cut, their nails newly manicured.

Once we'd finished the wine and the fish, we made our way over to the house, where the party was going full-swing. With one of the daughters of the man of the house leaning on my arm and the husband in front of me, we squeezed our way into the crowd, air-kissing the birthday girl. After which I was promptly way-laid by a strange woman babbling in English.

"It's your fault we never see her," she crowed. "You keeping her pregnant all the time!"

I smiled a rigid smile, all lips and teeth and no eyes at all, and nodded at her without saying a word before grabbing the husband and pushing my way further into the din, grabbing a glass of champagne and downing it.

And so the party went.

"Wouldn't you like to have a house like this?" the husband asked all wistful-like late in the evening after we'd been dancing, as he always does in this kind of situation.

No, I told him. He would hate it, make no mistake. The homogeneity, the rigidity, the disapproval, the conservatism.

It's my 16-year-old suburb-loathing self that rose up out of the 48-year-old me to say this. But really, the 16-year-old and the 48-year-old me's are in total agreement in this case. And having grown up there, both the me's know whereof I speak.

It would be dreadful to live out there, I said. But it's fun to be a tourist every once in awhile.

The Swedish word for the day is förort. It means suburb, of course.

2009-05-15T12:39:00.002+02:00

I lived in Barcelona once. I left behind a job and apartment in Washington, and with the money I'd gotten from my ex for the house we'd owned together in Dupont Circle, I took an eight-month vacation, travelling here and there for nearly two months - Amsterdam and Paris, London and Berlin, Vienna and Budapest and Lucca, a week or so in each place. I ended up in Barcelona, staying for six months.

This was in the day of the peseta, and Barcelona was cheap. You could buy two kilos of tomatoes, two kilos of oranges, a couple onions, a dozen eggs and a wedge of cheese for about $2.50. I rented a room in the Eixample Dret not far from the Sagrada Familia, paying about $100 a month to Edu, a crazy Argentinian, who became my closest friend.

It was the strangest time of my adult life, those six months in Barcelona.

I loved it and loathed it, it was a trial to be so outside the culture and so alone and so purposeless. But Barcelona has endless charms that I couldn't help but be taken by. There is no place I feel stronger about. It is tied to the great crux of my life - meeting the husband and leaving behind the States.

When the husband and I returned last week for the first time in ten years, it all came rushing back: the smells, the light, the special tiles of the sidewalks, the cutoff corners at every intersection, the plane trees, the peculiar reticence of Barcelonans, the late dinners and later dancing, the alternately sluggish and hectic pulse of the place.

I missed terribly my friend Edu, who died nearly seven years ago. I couldn't even admit to myself that I was sad and a bit prickly and feeling very vulnerable and raw, as if I had suddenly reverted to the self I was when I lived there, on my long vacation.

Funny how a place can turn a crank in one's heart, ratcheting everything up, notch by notch by notch.

Stranger still, none of this was apparent until I sat here to write it all down.

The Swedish verb for the day is att återkomma. It means to return.

2009-04-30T19:03:00.002+02:00

We're off to Perpignan for a wedding and then a week in Barcelona, which better damn well be sunny and warm. I haven't been back to Barcelona in 10 years, the city I love and hate most in the world.

Annoyingly, a week ago one of my best friends when I was just a little kid, whom I haven't seen in probably 25 years and who works as a film editor, cameraman and sometime director in L.A., contacted me to say he would be coming to Stockholm this week.

There was general gnashing of teeth. By me at least.

I told him that at least he and his boyfriend can stay in our apartment while we carouse in Spain.

It pleases me somehow to know that he'll be staying here, as if he's getting to know me all over again just by looking at the books on the shelves (not to mention piled high on a table in the library and in various other rooms), the perfume in the bathroom (which isn't mine), the elaborate collection of teas in the kitchen (which we don't drink), the lack of a full-length mirror (there are a couple of half-length mirrors though), the music on the grand piano (which needs tuning) and the freshly cleaned windows (all 17 of them, each divided into two or four casements, one of which was concealing a bee in the handle, a bee which stung me on my middle finger halfway through the whole ordeal).

What makes it okay, though, is that he'll be back again in December. Then I can check out if he really did learn anything about me from staying here, or if it was one big false impression.

The Swedish word for the day is missuppfattat. It means misunderstood.

2009-04-23T19:26:00.002+02:00

As my friend the policeman says, Stockholm's Old Town seems to be reverting back to the 18th century: Count Carl Piper and his pregnant girlfriend were shot in the schoolyard of the Great Church School during the late afternoon on Tuesday. It turns out that the prime suspect is the former Countess, Carl Piper's ex-wife.

It's downright operatic.

The Swedish word for the day is melodram. I bet you would never guess that it means melodrama.

2009-04-19T23:36:00.005+02:00

I remember when chocolate bars cost a dime. And three musketeers were the biggest - best value for money - except for the fact that the center was a bit too fluffy and curiously unsatisfying. Charleston chew lasted the longest, but it tasted more like marshmallow than chocolate. Chunky was pleasing in concept - a fat square of chocolate - except it had raisins in it, which was totally unacceptable. Butterfingers were too peanutbuttery and papery, bit O' honeys weren't even chocolate, and hershey bars were just too plain-Jane. Almond joy and mounds were too small and cocanutty, so in the end, with whatever was left over from my 25-cent-a-week allowance, it was always a toss-up between milky way or snickers.

I remember sitting on the stone stoop outside the kitchen door, a week after school was out when I was eight or nine, wearing shorts and nothing else, eating toast with butter and brown sugar sprinkled on top.

I remember the arduous task of taking off wet snow clothes in the basement - layer by layer, first jacket and then snow pants, and then jeans, all the way down to my long underwear - and hanging them up on the line in the furnace room, and the smell, like wool and rags and little-kid sweat and snow all mixed together.

What do you remember?

(This is all spurred on by my reading artist Joe Brainard's odd little masterpiece, I remember. Rustle up a copy for yourself, you won't be disappointed. And I was shocked at how many things I remembered that hadn't changed in the 20 years between our two childhoods.)

The Swedish verb for the day is att komma ihåg, which means to remember.

2009-04-15T21:44:00.003+02:00

To help cure the terrible melancholy - we would call it depression - of King Philip V of Spain, the queen and her physician believed that music would do the trick.

So the great castrato soprano Farinelli was brought to court. Though he had received great acclaim in Italy, England and France, and he was only 32 years old, Farinelli never performed in public again although he lived to be 77. Apparently, he sang the same two arias every night to the king. Whether it really cured his melancholia is open to debate. But Farinelli became a great favorite at the Spanish court. He amassed a small fortune including paintings by Velásquez and Murillo, and violins by Stradivarius and Amati, and was even knighted by the king's successor, Ferdinand VI (whose wife, Maria Barbara was the apt pupil of Domenico Scarlatti, who wrote hundreds of sonatas for her to play, many of them ground-breaking and of great charm and idiosyncrasy).

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all it took were the right music to dispel our darkest fears and worries and terrible unhappiness? If music was the tonic for the worst mental illness? It makes so much sense to me.

The Swedish word for the day is sorg. It means sorrow.

2009-04-03T08:30:00.000+02:00

It's official.

Well, it will be soon. As of May 1, the husband and I will just need to fill out a little piece of paper and our partnership becomes a real marriage, just like the heterosexualists!

Separate but equal will be a thing of the past.

And don't let anyone fool you about it just being a matter of semantics, either. Words make all the difference in the world.

The Swedish words for the day are partnerskap and äktenskap, which I suspect have both been the word of the day at some point before. They mean, respectively, partnership and marriage.

2009-03-29T21:03:00.003+02:00

On Friday, we went out dancing at 1 a.m. - well, really, it was Saturday by the time we made it to the club - because the pop star was going to be a dj at the club, and because Grace Jones was going to be there.

Sure enough, Miss Jones showed up about 1:30, but I didn't see her because these drag queens were in the way, and she swept herself off, elaborate hat and all, to a back room somewhere.

We left about 3:00, and the next day the pop star told us that after she'd finished at the turntables, she went back to meet Miss Jones.

"I like your earrings," Miss Jones told the pop star. "You're coming to see me tomorrow?"

A whole conversation reduced to two sentences. "She went from A to Z in three seconds," the pop star said, laughing.

So, the next day, we duly went to see her, with the pop star.

The concert itself was, without a doubt, astounding. The crowd eclectic - lots of fashionistas so the husband was all kiss-kiss with shiny people I'd never met before - and Miss Jones really shook her thing. And sang. And hoola-hooped while walking around in shoes with six-inch spikes as thin as nails. And changed hats and coats for every single song - she was on stage for over 90 minutes. She looked just as she has always looked (the pop star said she looks great close to as well). I can't believe she is 60. Although if I think about it, I was dancing to "Pull up to the bumper, baby" in 1981. Was it really that long ago?

I only hope my ass looks that good when I'm 60.

Which won't be long, considering how fast the birthdays keep rushing at me.

48.

I hope it's going to be a good year.

The Swedish word for the day is födelsedag, which has surely been the word of the day before. It means birthday.

2009-03-27T08:39:00.005+01:00

Swedes have a love of design.

They are minimalists – beauty is to be found in simple forms: unvarnished oiled wood, primary colors, thin lines. And as far as I can tell, Swedish tastes haven’t changed much in the past 50 years. Including the packaging for milk – simple rectangular boxes the size of a brick with red, green, blue and yellow stripes of varying thickness; the red stripes are the fattest and the yellow stripes the thinnest, designating the fat content of the milk. People actually refer to milk by the color of the stripe – the husband never tells me to buy whole milk, he tells me: “Get red milk.”

But the other day, I was taken aback to find a black box in our refrigerator.

What the hell is this, I wondered.

“Read the back,” the husband said, smiling at me.

I pulled it out. It was milk, but the package was black as a reminder to turn the lights out for Earth Hour, in which the world is being encouraged to turn out the lights at 8:30 p.m. (local time) on March 28.

An admirable idea. But not terribly appealing for a milk carton. Sort of an antidote to Life cereal (do they still make that?): Death Milk.

Milk for existentialists, perhaps?

Or a way to get emo boys and girls to consume their recommended daily allowance of calcium and vitamin D?

The Swedish word for the day is mejeri. It means dairy.

2009-03-23T23:23:00.002+01:00

K., who sits next to me at work, came in this morning as usual asking how my weekend was.

Good, I told her.

"Well," she said. "Remember I was talking about that dinner we were going to have with friends? It turned out they served us venison. Which they had shot themselves. In their yard. In Uppsala."

A deer had wandered into their yard and they shot it? In Uppsala, where the university is and which is not the countryside, not at all?

Yes, she said.

Ha, ha, I laughed.

I told her that if my parents had owned a gun when they lived in Boulder years ago, I think my mother would have made my father shoot the deer that would come and eat all her flowers, roses and tulips and irises, anything she planted. My mother is not really an animal person. Her sympathies extend to birds, and that's about it.

Ha, ha, K. laughed.

So, I asked K., was the food good?

"Delicious," K. said.

The Swedish word for the day is rådjur. It means deer.

2009-03-14T10:45:00.004+01:00

I was trying to explain to A. the TV producer about the proper hierarchy of fruit flavors - strawberry and peach at the top, blueberry near the bottom before plum and gojiberry.

"But you're mixing things up," A. said. "Berries aren't fruit, they're berries!"

I was flabbergasted. I was having enough trouble convincing her of the proper fruit-flavor rankings and all of a sudden I'm hit with a bizarre Swedish idiosyncrasy: Swedes don't consider berries fruit.

But, I asked, if they aren't fruit, what are they?

All the Swedes at the table jumped on me at once: "Berries, of course!"

And they would not be convinced by me that for us English speakers, berries are a category within the whole fruit family, somewhat like melons.

"I don't believe you," A. said. "And what about root fruits, huh?"

The Swedish words for the day are frukt, bär, rotfrukt. They mean fruit, berries, root vegetables.

2009-03-12T22:05:00.003+01:00

Somehow, we got the directions mixed up and ended up at the wrong apartment. But half a glass of wine and 20 minutes later, the children's book author and I figured it out, jumped into a cab and righted ourselves, landing at the dinner we were supposed to be at.

The husband, who had helped prepare the meal with the sea captain, thrust a bowl of pale orange creamy liquid at me.

I dipped a corn chip into it, looking at him skeptically.

"Do you like it?" he asked.

Yes, I told him.

"Do you really like it?" he asked again, hovering.

Yes, yes, I really like it I told him.

"Ha! It's cheese from a can, melted," he exclaimed.

As if I couldn't tell.

"He would never let me buy this!" he told the sea captain and the children's book author.

Of course I wouldn't. But it doesn't mean that I don't like it. Nor does it mean that it's good. Or good for you. It's junk food, that's what I told him. And junk food usually does taste good. But food that tastes good isn't the same thing as food that actually is good. I'm a terrible snob that way, but really, it's just about standards.

The Swedish word for the day is ost. It means cheese.

2009-02-28T11:12:00.003+01:00

We sat in the Korean restaurant across from the movie theater on Birger Jarlsgatan, me with my chop chae, A. the TV producer and O. her stepdaughter having some kind of salmon thing with lots of vegetable-y stuff, bowls of kimchee and sauces in front of us, surrounded mostly by what must surely be the entire Korean population of Stockholm.

"You know it's good Korean food if the restaurant is filled with Koreans," O. said.

"They have a sign on the bathroom that's only in Korean," A. said. "I can't believe it's not in Swedish, too. And then there's another sign inside that's also only in Korean! What do you think it means?"

We ate our food and ran over to the movie theater across the street, to watch the nine o'clock showing of the much-touted Milk , which opened in Sweden yesterday.

As we sat in the audience, I looked around me, noting that unlike the Korean restaurant, the crowd for this very gay movie was decidedly non-gay. Did this mean the movie wouldn't be as good as if it were a gay audience?

"How do you know there are no gay people?" A. asked. "People probably think we're a couple seeing this movie with our daughter. All these people could be just friends you know."

Well, I thought. Maybe not those people next to us kissing, nor the people next to them kissing. All this kissing - I guess they were making sure that we didn't mistake them for being just friends?

Um, probably not.

Despite the crowd being overwhelmingly not gay for this very gay movie, it almost lived up to the hype. Almost.

The Swedish word for the day is likartad. It means of a similar kind.

2009-02-24T22:11:00.003+01:00

Sweden is all abuzz.

After years of lobbying, the crown princess at last has convinced her parents to let her marry the man she loves. Who was her personal trainer. But, don't get the wrong idea. This guy isn't a hunk. He's kind of a schlub as far as I can tell. Keeps his nose clean though - the tabloids haven't managed to catch him doing anything unsavory. He's curiously bland. Which is perhaps in part why the king and queen finally caved in.

Prince Daniel.

It's kind of sweet. And of course it's spurring the usual debates about why the hell Sweden continues with the curious institution of monarchy at all.

If you ask me, there's something to be said for having a queen to hang your patriotism on. Maybe if America had a queen, people would vote for the wisest guy instead of the folksiest guy who can sing "God Bless America" most convincingly. And we never would have gotten stuck with Bush the Second or Ronald Reagan (whose reputation has been amazingly rehabilitated: Has everyone forgotten about the people he surrounded himself with, great moral leaders like Ed Meese, Cap Weinberger and Ollie North?)

Of course some people claim America does have a queen, they just can't agree on who she might be: Lady Bunny? Rufus Wainright? Dana Elaine Owens?

The Swedish word for the day is skvaller. It means gossip.

2009-02-16T23:51:00.003+01:00

I always like to tell the husband, as we walk down the street past a smug baby being wheeled in its stroller (and Stockholm has more smug babies in strollers than you could shake a very, very big stick at): Wouldn't it be fun to have an adult-sized stroller, with a huge nursemaid to push you around wherever you directed her to push you?

As if being a baby were all about being the boss of the world, as opposed to a life reduced to wailing to let the world know that one of your basic needs isn't being met and there is nothing you can do about it.

Take the poor baby in the apartment below ours. Well, really, his poor parents and siblings (four of them!) I mean. Because he's taken to crying late into the night, the kind of cry that escalates into an inconsolable rage that just goes on and on and on until he runs out of air, and then he begins again.

Do parents ever commit suicide from a baby screaming like that? Or are they more likely eventually to try shaking the baby into submission?

I would've thought that human beings had naturally selected out those angry raging-type babies by now.

And I've got to let go of that bizarre adult-sized stroller fantasy joke thing. It's just stupid and, well, kind of creepy, really.

The Swedish word for the day is barnvagn. It means stroller.

2009-02-09T22:44:00.002+01:00

Can you believe it, I've gone graphic?!?

It wasn't an easy decision, in my tiny blogging world.

But what, you non-Swedes may ask, does that strange-looking tube of toothpaste have to do with learning Swedish the hard way?

That is no toothpaste. It is a tube of fish roe, mixed with sugar, salt, tomato paste and potato flakes. And for me, more emblematic of Sweden than just about anything else, including the flag, Crown Princess Victoria, H&M or a Volvo 740. Probably even more of a true symbol of Sweden than Abba is. The only thing equal to Kalles Kaviar would be Ikea. But who wants a picture of Ikea on the top of their blog when a tube of Kalles Kaviar is so much more graphically pleasing?

And somehow, more appropriate, since it is perhaps as difficult a taste to acquire as the Swedish language. (Although to be honest, I've always rather liked it squeezed onto a boiled egg instead of salt.)

The Swedish word for the day is ikoniskt. It means, of course, iconic.

2009-01-27T19:50:00.003+01:00

Walking down Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, I noticed suddenly that everyone seemed to be walking a dachshund. There were dachshunds on leashes, dachshunds in people's arms, dachshunds at people's feet, and way too many dachshunds actually sitting in their owner's laps, eating off of plates on café tables. Ick.

Had I missed a trend? Is the new American thing to own a dachshund? Were people going to look down on me because I was dachshundless? I was baffled.

Then I saw that there was a dog show of some sort going on in the park between the road and the beach. Well, a dachshund show, to be specific. What a relief.

Miami was far more enjoyable than I expected, even though I kept on trying to speak Swedish with the waiters, on account of I was there with 50 Swedes and my brain kept getting stuck in a Swedish rut, convinced by language that I was in Sweden despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The sun.

The beach.

The Biltmore Hotel.

The dachshunds.

It almost makes me jealous of Floridians. Almost.

The Swedish word of the day is tax. It means dachshund, natch.

2009-01-19T23:12:00.005+01:00

The dinner started with the usual Stockholm formalities: a couple of drinks and a discussion of real estate. The host and hostess - my husband used to work with her - had just managed to sell their apartment, which is in an old industrial part of town that is now expensive new apartments and stores, complete with a streetcar line, all sprung up in the last five years.

A discussion of the price of rent, mortgages or an apartment just bought or sold is essential for the typical Stockholm dinner party.

But then when we sat down to eat the smoked duck breast and greens they'd brought back with them from Paris, all we talked about was food. What to get in Paris and what you can get here in the markets, how to make pesto better by mixing the nuts, the simplest way to cook salmon, how nowadays you can get such good wine that isn't French. Food, drink and food and recipes and more food, for more than three hours.

Since when did talking about food become as important as the food itself?

Funny how food is so much more of a class marker than it was in my parents' day. Well, maybe not more, but just in a different way, I suppose.

We did manage to change the subject a bit toward the end, but unlike our usual dinner parties, there were no heated discussions.

I think the husband's favorite part of the evening was when he got a goody bag full of bottles and jars from the hostess, who works for a huge French company that makes beauty products.

"Yes," she said, "I think the blue is for you. I use the green myself."

The Swedish word for the day is matkultur. It means cuisine.

p.s. I am slowly adding all my links at left, so don't feel left out if I haven't gotten to you yet. I will eventually...

2009-01-13T20:38:00.001+01:00

Twenty days of Christmas? Who knew! More importantly, why would anyone extend the holidays all the way to tjugondag Knut, January 13, Saint Knut's day, when Swedes traditionally take down the tree and children plunder it for the candy canes and chocolates that hang there?

Maybe it's just that if you're like me, it takes that long to be assed to take down the tree after all the extensive holiday entertaining.

To be honest, I'm a sucker for a Christmas tree. I have been ever since I was a little boy.

I blame my parents. Oddly, they grew up in strict Calvinist households with no trees and not much Christmas celebrating aside from church, exchanging a few presents and a bit of holiday noshing. But like many Americans who grew up during and immediately after the Second World War, they were determined to give their children luxuries they never had. So Christmas in our house was a major production, something that as a boy I used to plan for starting in September. And in the most extreme years - my last two grades of high school - the mountainous pile of loot under the tree was so obscene that my parents eventually racheted the consumption down more than just a few notches.

But I still have a nostalgic love of Christmas trees. So to be honest, it takes me 20 days to get to the point where I am so sick of the tree I have to get it out of my apartment.

To be fair to myself, it took only 19 days this year.

"Isn't it nice to have everything all clean and put away?" asked the husband, once everything was disposed of and tidied. He has no nostalgia for trees, and no great fondness for the holidays in general.

Yes, well, of course, I answered.

The Swedish word for the day is julgran. It means Christmas tree.

2009-01-07T19:42:00.006+01:00

O, the horror.

My old commenting function is defunct. And I thought I'd just switch to blogger comments, but my jury-rigged ancient template (I'm warning you, do not under any circumstances look under the hood of this blog) won't let me.

So bear with me. I'll probably switch to a generic template if I can figure out how to import my blog links altogether instead of one at a time, which will take an eternity.

Anyway, if you want to comment, just send me a mail using the contact-me link at left.

In the meantime, I'm recovering from a marathon of guests and dinners formal and informal, a flooded basement in Chicago, prolonged jetlag and post-Christmas distress syndrome.

The Swedish word for the day is shit. It means shit in a more emphatic, colorful and cussy way than plain old skit, which also means shit.

- by Francis S.

2008-12-19T16:47:00.006+01:00

We agreed to meet at Moderna Museet, Emi and I. She brought her youngest, and then she tricked me, the minx. I was supposed to treat her for lunch, but she snuck ahead in line and paid before I could stop her.

“I’m a Swedish woman, I can’t let you pay,” she explained.

Once we’d actually settled down, and the baby was chewing on bread and I had gotten my salad, we got down to business. Which was just really jabbering away. It’s been way too long, I told her. She agreed.

It used to be so odd, to meet people in the flesh after reading what they write. But now it’s par for the course. Although few quite live up to their writing the way Emi does - she's just as sexy, funny and charming as you would imagine. But what else can you expect from a blogging celebrity? She’s the bee’s knees, Emi is.

The Swedish phrase for the day is Brev till Marc Jacobs. It means Letters to Marc Jacobs.

- by Francis S.

2008-12-10T19:43:00.001+01:00

The goal was preserved lemons – the Moroccan kind, salty and sour and full of flavor – and the only place I know to get them is at the lamb stall at Hötorgshallen market. The young adult author is visiting from London, so tomorrow it will be turkey breast with capers and sultanas and pine nuts and preserved lemons.

When I reached Hötorget – the Haymarket – the Stockholm Concert Hall, which sits on one side of the square, was jammed with cars and men in tails and women in evening gowns and Japanese paparazzi, all higgledy piggledy in the rain.

Ah, the Nobel Prizes. How could I forget? The time of the year when physicists and chemists and economists are treated like rockstars. I didn’t even mind them getting in the way as I ran to catch the market before it closed.

But when I got down to the stall, they had no preserved lemons, dammit. Will it taste the same with regular lemons?

The Swedish word for the day is besvärlig. It means annoying.

- by Francis S.

2008-12-03T20:35:00.003+01:00

When the sun struggles to stay above the horizon, and it’s dark when you rise, and dark when you walk to work, and it never really gets much lighter than dusk, it takes all my energy to not spend all my non-working hours at home, curled up with a book and a fire burning in the fireplace. But I force myself to take a walk each lunchtime: through the downtown park Kungsträdgården, then up Skeppsholmen past Grand Hotel and the National Museum on one side, the ferries out to the archipelago on the other. At noon, a light shines in every window, and the hotel is garlanded in green, and strings of lights hang on the ferries.

As I rounded the boat slips at the back of Moderna Museet, and made my way up toward the tiny island of Kastellholmen, I looked across the water at Gröna Lund, Stockholm’s venerable little amusement park. Long closed for the winter, I was surprised to see a single car on the roller coaster, whizzing around, and then stopping as if to tie its shoe. It looked so lonely up there, under all those banks of clouds pressing down on the city.

I continued on my way, and then when I was on the hill of Kastellholmen, looking again at the roller coaster, I saw the car had been joined by a second one. They looked as if they were playing together. Somehow, it was suddenly comforting instead of dismaying, watching the empty cars in the empty park, in the grey of deep midwinter.

And then I went on my way.

The Swedish word for the day is tröst. It means solace.

- by Francis S.

2008-11-16T23:01:00.002+01:00

So, the good thing about Facebook is getting in touch with people you haven't been in touch with in years.

And the bad thing about Facebook, of course, is getting in touch with people you haven't been in touch with in years. As in people from junior high school.

I've been in a foul mood all weekend, and I just realized it's because I somehow ended up on Facebook discussing junior high - well, middle school to be perfectly accurate - with one of my former classmates. I guess I'd totally blocked out how loathsome fifth, sixth and seventh grade were for me, a skinny and short and painfully unathletic, slightly effeminate gay boy, not quite but almost at the bottom of the Elm Place Middle School food chain.

I remember in the seventh grade I got a headache every single day during seventh period. My mother even brought me to the doctor, who said it was nothing. I think it was actually fifth period band practice, where "Dr." Schoonover used to pitch a fit nearly every day, throwing his baton at us and making us play whatever part we'd just messed up, one by one, and anyone who made a mistake would have to stay after school and practice.

And low as I was, I still remember making fun of the poor girl who was stuck at the very bottom of the elaborate Elm Place hierarchy - not really to her face but by flirting with some other little girl, tagging each other with the "germs" from the girl stuck at the bottom. We were merciless, in that thoughtless way children can be. Until one day during social studies, in the sixth grade, she was sent to the office and the principal came in and gave us all a lecture about treating her so badly. Which shamed me. I stopped it with the stupid germ play.

It was such a revelation to get to high school, where you could actually choose your friends based on whether you liked them or not, and not based on any number of other bizarre criteria, such as whether their desk was near yours, or that they lived near you. And the high school was so big, with 2,500 students, that there was no social hierarchy, just different groups, and people were no longer teased or excluded.

I suppose I learned something from middle school about compassion, but I can't imagine that it was worth it. You couldn't make me go through it again, not for anything.

The Swedish word for the day is tortyr. It means, of course, torture.

- by Francis S.

2008-11-09T23:34:00.004+01:00

What a week. First Barack Obama wins the election, to everyone's great relief. "Congratulations," I was told by various coworkers and acquaintances. As if it were my doing. And yes, I did do my small part, although I'm registered in DC and DC always votes democratic, so I'm not sure how exactly my little vote made a difference. Still, I could do nothing but beam about it.

But then there came the sting.

All those nasty hateful anti-gay ballot measures that passed. What is it about gay marriage that scares a majority of the straight population into adding amendments to state constitutions? Is there any way to stop this from happening or do we just have to wait until the WWII generation kicks the bucket? While I'm not surprised really, it is nonetheless dismaying.

(Which is not to say that Sweden doesn't have its own problems with gay marriage: the current center-right coalition government has been trying to convince the hold-out party - the Christian Democrats of course - to sign on to a coalition-sponsored resolution to make marriage gender neutral. But they've finally given up and will instead let it go out as a general resolution for members to vote on. I'm not 100 percent sure I understand exactly the difference between these things - in Swedish one is proposition and one is a motion and I don't remember which is which. Anyway, it is certain to pass since of the seven parties in Parliament, the only party against it are the Christian Democrats, which also happened to be the smallest party and make up a tiny minority. It's expected to be up and running by May 2009. How's that for a bit of Swedish political arcana for you?)

Still, I keep the faith. My remarkable parents are fighting the good fight, doing far more than I have ever done to further the cause of equality for the whole GBLTQ sandwich segment of the population. And my dear friend L. is making his way on a book tour, plugging his history for teenagers - Gay America: The Struggle For Equality - which should be in every damn city and school library in the country. L. was in fact signing the book at Barbara's, which curiously enough just happens to be my parents' local bookstore in Oak Park. And my mom, as always, doing her part, buying copies for the library and the public schools, and for the PFLAG group that she founded, and for herself of course.

I salute you, L. And you, too, mom.

There, I'm done proselytizing.

The Swedish phrase of the day is andas ut. It literally means breathe out, but I think a better colloquial translation would be breathe a sigh of relief.

- by Francis S.

2008-10-30T20:27:00.004+01:00

I may as well admit it. I have become my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Wills.

I realize I've become Mrs. Wills because I keep finding the word "crater" used as a verb in the New York Times, and all I can do is cluck my tongue. Not out loud, I mentally cluck my tongue. But very vigorously and at length.

Crater the noun and cratered the adjective I am familiar with, but since when did crater become a verb meaning "collapsing"? I blame John McCain, who David Letterman reported - over and over - that McCain had cancelled his appearance on the show because "the economy is cratering."

So why is everyone at the New York Times suddenly obsessed with cratering? Here and here, for instance.

Isn't it amazing that with everything happening in the world, I find myself complaining about some stupid little grammar point, as if it weren't actually me witnessing the birth of a new verb.

Please save me from my curmudgeonly self.

The Swedish word for the day is krater. It is the noun crater in Swedish. As far as I can tell, there is no verb form.

- by Francis S.

2008-10-11T18:31:00.002+02:00

So the big news this week in Sweden - other than deep economic woe - are the Nobel prize awards. This year, after the Secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl made some snide remarks about Americans being too focused on American culture to be great writers, it came as no surprise that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the prize - well, no great surprise to the many who bet that he would win at Ladbrokes.

"I have a strong suspicion there has been a leak in the system this time," said Horace.

Feh.

And I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of Le Clézio until several days before the award was given out, when his name was bandied about in the Swedish papers, no doubt by book critics who were beneficiaries of the leak that Horace was talking about.

What I found most interesting was that Horace revealed to Sweden's No. 1 daily Dagens Nyheter that the Swedish Academy has in recent years used sort of "half-code" names for nominees: Chateaubriand for Le Clézio, Little Dorrit for Doris Lessing and Harry Potter for Harold Pinter.

Harry Potter?!?

Am I the only one that thinks that some of these names show a certain lack of imagination on the part of the committee? Surely, Horace, you could have come up with something better? Is such a group of lame namegivers really capable of choosing who should get such a fat prize so full of prestige?

I guess smart gamblers will be skulking about in Den Gyldene Freden - the restaurant where the Swedish Academy officially hangs out - in the future and listening in on conversations to see if anyone drops odd names in peculiar fashion.

Although to be fair, it isn't as easy at it seems to come up with clever code names. What would you use?

The Swedish word of the day, which is actually tangentially related to the topic if you look at it sideways while squinting your eyes, is illusionsmåleri, at the request of O., the daugher of C. the fashion photographer. Interestingly, English doesn't have a word for this, we borrow from the French: trompe l'oeil, we say.

- by Francis S.

2008-09-29T20:55:00.002+02:00

Lying in bed, in the white, white room at the Hotel Opera in Valencia, the husband napping fitfully beside me, the shades low and the sun burning behind them, it was everything I never did when I lived in Spain ten years ago. For one thing, one night in this hotel cost as much as one-month's rent for my little room in Edu's apartment ten years ago. All my great insecurity, living in Spain ten years ago, gone and I felt as if I'd arrived. But it felt melancholy all the same. Spain has such a strange effect on me.

We were there to watch the popstar do her thing before an audience of 65,000 - she'd given us the tickets, since she was opening for Our Lady of the Perpetual Rebranding, and we couldn't pass up the opportunity, flying down and arriving a couple of hours before the concert. Wrestling our way backstage through the clueless security, we gossiped and watched the popstar have her makeup applied in her little trailer. Not meeting our Lady of the Perpetual Rebranding, who hasn't even bothered to say hello to the popstar, not even after ten concerts.

She put on quite a show.

The popstar, I mean.

As for Our Lady, I was rather disappointed. It was like Las Vegas for awhile, all glitter and kicking and posturing like 13-year-olds, but then Our Lady sang off key. I can't abide people singing off key. And someone should tell her that she needs to cut that shit with trying to play the guitar. She looked as if it was all she could to keep her head above water because the guitar was dragging her down, down, down. We left before she was finished. To avoid the traffic.

Back at the hotel, a couple of boys recognized the popstar, gushing and almost squealing outside the elevators. We paused to take a picture for them, boy then popstar then boy, before going up to our room.

We woke the next morning far too early and after wandering around the city - the husband lived there once when he was hardly more than a boy himself - seeing the old city gate and the cathedral and the mad monstrous and beautiful buildings of Calatrava, we went back to the hotel to rest. But with the husband napping fitfully next to me in that white, white hotel room, all I could think was how different it was ten years ago, and how very good that things have changed.

The Swedish word for the day is upplevelse. It means experience.

- by Francis S.

2008-09-12T21:15:00.001+02:00

Mrs. W. came to visit, arriving the day after we got back from New York. We'd just spent three days with her and Mr. W. in Boston, so it was a luxury to have her stay. And then she prolonged her visit, so she was with us nearly a month. The perfect guest, Mrs. W. is. And what makes the perfect guest?

First, the perfect guest gives massages to both hosts - and the perfect guest is a trained masseuse, so they aren't just any old massages, they are deep and long, and if you request feet only, you get feet only.

Second, the perfect guest can take care of herself. She makes herself at home, but she cleans up after herself and even cleans out the plastic bags under the sink.

The perfect guest leaves little friendly notes about her whereabouts, half for information and half just as a gesture of affection.

The perfect guest gives you a goodnight kiss on the cheek and a hug.

The perfect guest is impressed with your cooking and religiously writes down recipes on her laptop while you cook, in between helping you out by chopping vegetables if you let her, because to be honest, you aren't much of a team player and it isn't just anyone you let in your kitchen while you cook.

The perfect guest loves to knit on the sofa while you play the piano and then patiently listens to you explain how the Goldberg Variations work and why they're brilliant and finds them as amazing as you do.

The perfect guest cries at your favorite sentimental movies as you watch together, eating chocolates and little sour candies.

The perfect guest finds your friends fascinating and not only listens well, put comments thoughtfully and laughs at all the right places.

Sadly, eventually the perfect guest will have to go back to Boston, to her husband, who no doubt has missed her dreadfully.

The Swedish phrase for the day is vi ses igen snart. It means we'll see each other again soon.

- by Francis S.

2008-08-25T20:15:00.004+02:00

The restaurant was full even though it was a Monday night. Or almost full. It being Chelsea, there was a Eurotrash section in the back, but the rest of the place was boys, boys, boys. And I guess the old confusion about the difference between Eurotrash and gayboys is true, because somehow they put us in the wrong section.

Are we that obvious?

Next to us, a British couple were mooning over their food, and on the other side a table of three kids of indeterminate orientation sat on the banquette side of the table, all facing the same way.

"They're high," the husband said to me in Swedish, smirking a bit and sucking on his mojito.

Swedish is handy that way, although you can get burned. You never know when that table next to you is actually undercover Swedish. Swedes are everywhere.

So we sat in the Eurotrash section, watched the boys in the rest of the place whooping it up, gossiping and laughing and having a gay old time.

It was in the middle of the main course - chicken in Pipian sauce for me, lamb for the husband - that the husband saw, out of the corner of his eye, a mouse run down the corner of the banquette on the other side of the Brits. The female member of the couple caught my husband's eye, astonished.

"It was a mouse," the husband said.

"Are you sure it wasn't a cockroach?" the woman asked.

"I thought it was a spider," her companion said.

"It was definitely a mouse," the husband said.

When they came to ask us how everything was - the service, as always, is astonishingly good compared to Stockholm service, which is blunt and perfunctory at best - we told the waitress we'd seen a mouse, but discreetly. Within 30 seconds, the hostess was sitting between our two tables, apologizing at length. She went back to her post, we went back to our meal and the mouse reappeared, this time at our end of the banquette. And this time I saw it. It was definitely a mouse.

The hostess came back, with a letter for each couple giving us 40 dollars off the meal or a later one if we wished.

The kids at the banquette, who had not seen the mouse, squirmed. "What is that, Is it because of us?" the cute boy with his arm in a cast asked. "Are we being too loud and obnoxious?"

"No," the husband said. "Are you high?"

They broke out laughing. "How could you tell?" the boy asked, sotto voce and almost flirting.

The husband just gave the boy a look.

The Brits next to us, non-plussed by the mouse, told us to order the Valrhona chocolate cake. "It's delicious," the woman said. "You know he proposed to me three years ago at this very table, this very day."

We congratulated them, and the kids at the banquette congratulated them, and then I suddenly realized that it had been nine years ago to the day that the husband had proposed to me, which I shared with everyone.

Our engagement anniversary and we hadn't even known it.

"Congratulations," the kids sang out again. "Congratulations."

Yes, yes. Congratulations to us.

As we walked out the door, drunk on wine and bloated with food, we stopped by the hostess and told her all was well.

Pshaw, I said. It's not like it was a rat...

The Swedish word for the day is förlovningsdag. It means engagement anniversary (well, and engagement day, too).

- by Francis S.

2008-08-04T16:45:00.003+02:00

I can hardly believe it, but I started this blog seven years ago today. That's a very short time in people years, but in blog years it's an eternity - an awful lot of the people who were around when I started have long since disappeared or moved on to other stuff, including paying blogging gigs.

I was so good at keeping it up for so long, but I know I've been slacking off more and more over the years. I keep promising myself that I will do better, but then I never really do. I'm lucky to get in two posts a month.

But never fear. I'm not about to give up without a fight.

So, happy birthday little blog. May you live long.

The Swedish word for the day is sju år gammal. It means seven years old.

- by Francis S.

2008-07-30T19:53:00.003+02:00

The first glimpse of Svalbard was a couple of mountaintops poking through the dense cloud cover. Snow-capped and not very sharp, they looked like little islands in a sea of foam. Then we cut through the clouds and there it was: the bay off of Isfjord, the little hardscrabble town of Longyearbyen, and finally the airport.

It looks like Wyoming on the ocean. Uh, but with glaciers and no trees.

The first day, we took an open boat up the fjord, packed into our survival suits and looking through our goggles, the sea not terribly rough, the sky grey and low and looming, the cliffs beside us jagged and with a colony of murres diving and fishing all around. Abandoned mines and villages line the fjord, melancholy, beautiful in their ugliness. Then at last we came out from under the clouds, and the sea was suddenly deep blue, the sun intense, and we could at last see the tops of the mountains. The guide took us all the way out to the end of the fjord, to the old radio station, which has been converted into a lonely hotel, at the tip of nowhere.

"The problem is that during the spring and summer, the only way to get there is by boat," the guide, Klas, told us. "One time, I had to take people back to the airport in the middle of the night and the sea was so choppy, they threw up the whole way and had to get right on the plane soaking wet and exhausted."

(For some reason, there's only one flight a day in the afternoon, and the rest of the flights are at 3 and 4 and 4:30 a.m., depending on the day of the week.)

The next day - although it all seemed like one long day of course, with the sun rolling around the sky instead of rising and setting - we climbed up a high ridge overlooking the town. The clouds rolled in and rolled out, all ghostly and magical, and we drank water racing down from somewhere far above us. When we reached the top, with Longyearbyen spread out below us, and beyond that the bay and more mountains, I could barely look down.

"The reason we have to have guns," said our hiking guide, Marthe, with her rifle casually slung over her shoulder, "is because in 1996, two girls were climbing up over there- " she gestured to a high ridge on the other side of the town, "and they ran into a polar bear. One of the girls jumped over the side."

We - the husband and I, and the sea captain and the children's book author - gave a collective gasp.

"But she was the one who survived," Marthe said. "Just a few scratches. And now we always have to have guns outside the town."

"So the lesson is that if you run into a polar bear, jump over the cliff," the children's book author said.

Unfortunately, I would be the girl who got eaten by the polar bear. Jumping over a cliff is not something I could do.

We walked down the other side of the ridge, onto a glacier, avoiding the really wet spots, hopping over streams of icy water, picking our way through occasional piles of rocks and looking for fossils of leaf marks, and eventually making our way back to the car and the town of Longyearbyen.

The Swedish word for the day is ishavet. It means the arctic ocean.

- by Francis S.

2008-07-22T23:26:00.003+02:00

The husband has been gone for over a week, and I'm getting punchy. I've distracted myself by going out to the country house of the children's book author and the sea captain, dinner with A. the TV producer and C. the fashion photographer, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, bad TV, work, Wikipedia (have you ever heard of silent film star Sessue Hayakawa, who was a kind of pre-Rudolf Valentino, making $5,000 a week playing heartthrobs? It seems early Hollywood was both more and less conventional in its tastes and portrayals than I ever imagined) and Youtube (how come no one ever told me before about Helen Kane?).

But enough is enough.

The husband comes back late tonight, and none too soon.

The Swedish word for the day is älskling. It means sweetie.

- by Francis S.

2008-07-08T11:19:00.002+02:00

When we arrived at the bus stop with the cat doctor and his boyfriend in tow, a group of fellow party-goers were already there. We were on our way out to the countryside for a Fifth of July party given by the children’s book writer and the sea captain, and everyone was thankful that the bus strike had ended that morning, just in time.

But then the bus never arrived. So we ordered three cabs to take us to land’s end, over three bridges and as far out in the Stockholm archipelago as one can drive, with Stockholm’s public transportation system footing the bill (how great is that?).

Things were well underway once we arrived, the hosts pressing drinks in our hands, the guests a wild mix of folk from lands near and far, the food vaguely or not-so-vaguely American, hamburgers and hotdogs and chocolate cupcakes with coconut frosting, everyone wiping their mouths with the American flag napkins.

Sometime late in the evening, hundreds of beers later, as I sat talking to a woman who is an agent for a bunch of small clothing labels in Stockholm, another woman who is one of the designers of the clothing labels came in and sat down next to us.

“My boyfriend just peed on 49 trees,” she said. “In one pee. He won.”

The clothing agent looked at me and gulped. We looked at the boyfriend in his long grey sweater and bangs hanging in his eyes.

“Ew! Didn’t you get pee all over your shoes?” she asked the boyfriend.

“Only half over them!” he said, laughing. “No, no, just joking.” Then he looked down at his shoes. “Well, half joking.”

In the morning, it turned out that something like 23 people slept over, including three roommates – two men and one woman – who had slept, wearing matching flannel pajamas, under a canopy set up outside.

We took the ferry back into town, everyone silent and worn out, the cat doctor and his boyfriend jet-lagged still and the husband terribly hung over from an excess of single-malt scotch.

Did you like it, I asked the cat doctor.

“Fun was had by all,” he said.

The Swedish phrase for the day is femte juli. It means Fifth of July.

by Francis S.

2008-06-13T18:14:00.003+02:00

It was a Sunday, but the theater was sold out. We were on the list though, so we hadn't had to worry about getting in.

And there we were, standing with a couple thousand screaming, singing, sweating fans, singing and sweating and even screaming a bit ourselves. The pop star was radiant, raw, possessed - by the music, by us, by the power she had over everyone in the room. Next to us, teenaged girls screamed and laughed at each other for screaming, and sang along with nearly every song; in front of us, boys with perfect bodies hugged each other, swayed with the music, their arms waving above their heads, and sang along with nearly every song. All of us dripping with sweat and a bit out of our minds. It was so very Bacchanalian, abandoning ourselves ecstatically to the moment en masse (and some were surely enhancing their ecstasy with, um, ecstasy, no doubt) like Maenads, although maybe not quite as bloodthirsty.

After the singing was done and we had invaded the filthy and dingy green room, we dragged her down with us to the stage door where she signed papers and posed for her fans while we waited, and then we all went to a restaurant in Soho that serves dinner and fancy-schmancy cocktails (in former days they would have been bedecked with paper umbrellas, but no one does that anymore) after midnight.

I drank my first cocktail in a few gulps, still floating on it all (which is quite something for a guy whose most-played song on his ipod is an obscure aria from Handel's Semele).

"You were just so amazing up there," I told the pop star. "I'm so proud to know you." And I gave her a kiss on the forehead.

She beamed back at me. "Thank you," she said. Really, what else could she say? And she gave me a squeeze.

Then we ate our late dinner - there were twelve of us in the end - and drank our cocktails and took stupid photos of each other and laughed loudly and long - the pop star laughing loudest and longest - until it was finally time to jump in cabs and go home to bed.

London is so much fun.

The Swedish word for the day is överlycklig. It means overjoyed.

- by Francis S.

2008-06-06T10:10:00.002+02:00

The thing about this time of year, when it never quite gets fully dark, is that the light is like a drug running through your veins. I feel all hopped up on light, buzzing with it and unable to quite settle down fully at night as I go through the apartment turning out lights at midnight and see that the sky in the north isn't black, but blue and the apartment is in fact glowing with it once the electric lights are out.

It almost seems a pity to be taking the long weekend - today is Sweden's National Holiday, which became a bank holiday only recently - to fly to London, where it will undoubtedly be grey and raining.

Almost.

The purpose is to go see our friend the pop star, who has become the biggest little thing out of Sweden, do her thing at a club in Soho. All with a big group of most of our best friends, Swedes and Brits alike.

What more could you ask for?

The Swedish word for the day is blå himmel. It means blue sky.

- by Francis S.

2008-05-23T07:47:00.001+02:00

Is the inside of the elbow a minor thing of beauty, in some cultures at least? Or am I getting fact confused with silly lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan?

Whether or not it’s erogenous or beautiful, the crook of the arm apparently has its own culture. By culture, I mean bacteria. According to the New York Times, researchers have discovered that the skin on the inside of the human elbow contains six very distinctive bacterial cultures. Which somehow brings up the idea of the other definition of culture, and conjures images of the body as a world of its own. Think of all the rich and complex cultures living their rich and complex lives on top of us. And all the dirtiest places are undoubtedly the richest and most complex. Like the, uh, mouth for instance.

But the metaphor sort of breaks down if we imagine that each of us, world that we are, walks around with similar cultures in similar places. As if duplicate earths existed, billions of them, all with their own versions of Sweden and Botswana and Belize and Vanuatu, the same but different.

On the other hand, the article talks about the National Human Genome Research institute has realized that studying just the genomes that we contain is missing out on all those genomes of microbes that we depend on but aren’t technically a part of our bodies. Which conjures something completely different: maybe we are actually a little bit like our own first impressions of ourselves after we’ve made our way out of our mothers’ wombs, when we can’t differentiate between what is us and what is the rest of the world.

And now I’m sounding like a college student in the aftermath of a particularly fat and juicy spliff.

The Swedish phrase for the day is utan gränser. It means without boundaries or without borders.

- by Francis S.

2008-05-10T12:08:00.002+02:00

As we passed under the Aqueduct of Valens, the guide explained that it was Atatürk who had changed the name of the city from Constantinople to Istanbul when he formed the republic. "Istanbul means 'I go to the city' and it is what many people called the city already," the guide said.

Well, I went to the city all right, with all its mosques and the magnificent Hagia Sofia, and the ancient Grand Bazaar which is still impressive, the spice market, the eerie Basilica Cistern, the Topkapi Palace with its tranquil gardens of Gülhane, and the other elegant buildings lining the Bosporus. This is one of the many great things about working for a Swedish company in Sweden: company trips to take the baths at Budapest, or ski the slopes in the Swiss Alps, or wander around one of the fabled cities of the world, Istanbul, which was Constantinople, and before that, Byzantium.

I even managed an evening with an old friend who lives there, who showed me around Beyoglu and Tunel where you must walk in between cafe tables to make your way through the narrow winding streets. And on to Tarlabasi, where he lives, amid prostitutes and thieves, a district that apparently horrifies all Turks he meets.

"The wierdest are what I first thought to be ugly little old village ladies working as prostitutes. Then I realized they were actually men dressed as little old village ladies," he said. "There's something for everyone." And then he chortled.

Now I just need to convince the husband that we must visit in the autumn.

The Swedish word for the day is förtjust. It means smitten.

- by Francis S.

2008-04-28T21:33:00.002+02:00

It was inevitable.

I had to look up the word awning.

Not because I have forgotten what it means, but because I suddenly thought that it also maybe meant idea or notion, as in the phrase "I have no idea" or "I haven't the faintest notion."

The reason is simple: The Swedish translation of those phrases would be ingen aning, which to my American mouth comes out sounding very much like the word awning. Well, the last part comes out sounding like awning.

And now I'm certain that I've been using the nonsensical English phrase I have no awning from time to time.

O, the shame.

It makes me worry that I'm losing my English while not really getting any better with the Swedish. Sure, after nine years I'm fluent and even comfortable with the Swedish language, but I still make mistakes, mistakes that I myself can hear almost every time I open my mouth.

I guess my brain has just reached its language capacity, it can't hold anymore. I can't insert anything more without taking something else away.

Dammit. It's such a little brain, all things considered.

Now, just because I'm feeling generous today, and intent on proving that my brain is still functioning full force, I'm giving you a separate Swedish phrase for the day, above and beyond what I've already given: på köpet. It means in the bargain.

- by Francis S.

2008-04-20T18:18:00.003+02:00

The distance was no more than about 200 meters between the chapel and the chateau. It was called a chateau, but it was more a glorified rambling farmhouse than a castle, with wings and rooms and sets of apartments and offices and the biggest kitchen I've ever seen built onto it over the years, formal parterres in the front, a tennis court hidden behind hedges in the midst of an ancient grove of almonds, and a wine cellar with nearly 500,000 bottles of wine. And it had my three qualifications for a perfect house: back stairs, a dumbwaiter and a secret room accessible through a set of sliding bookcases in the library (a room which turned out to be our bedroom for the stay). The weather was glorious - sunny during the day, but just short of hot, a blue sky clear but for a single cloud, as round and small and endearing as a bumblebee.

The Danish priest, who had been imported from Denmark down to Provence for the occasion, complete with that old-fashioned white ruff that only Danish priests still seem to wear, led the way to the chapel. The baby in his arms, the rest of us followed him down the front walk under the bare plane trees, out through the gate, down the road and up to the chapel, which was tucked away up a road going through the vineyards, in a clump of trees.

Stuffy and dim as a crypt, all 120 of us packed into the single room, with its low vault and crumbling stone walls, candles burning in every available nook and cranny. God only knows how old it was.

I understood barely a word of the service - Danes swallow the ends of words, so it just sounds to me like a slew of vowels with a few consonants tucked in for good measure - and the psalms were even hard to sing, the melody going unexpectedly this and that way. It went on almost too long for me, a feeling of claustrophobia was setting in when at last the service was over, and the baby was christened, and everyone streamed back out into the sunshine, congratulating the parents and his older sister, cooing over him and walking back down the dusty road, through the gate and up the walkway past the gardens, where wine and cheese and pate and all kinds of good French comestibles awaited us, and we celebrated until long past midnight, the baby sleeping fitfully on account of the crowd and not because he at last had gotten his true name: Sirius.

Me, after the onion soup at 1:30 a.m. or so, I slept like a prince in the secret room, the husband next to me, snoring lightly.

The Swedish word for the day is dop. It means baptism.

- by Francis S.

2008-03-29T09:39:00.004+01:00

And so, the annual changing of the number in my biography at left. Fifty approaches, I can see it on the horizon.

The Swedish word for the day is fyrtiosju. It means forty-seven. Although to be honest, I don't know whether it's correct to insert a hyphen or not in either language, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

- by Francis S.

2008-03-27T20:24:00.003+01:00

It was another dinner, in honor of the visiting mother of the children's book author, and about when the lamb tagine and couscous had almost disappeared from our plates, we got onto the subject of teeth and braces and dentists. We went around and around about who had had braces, who had the best teeth and whether it was smart to have your wisdom teeth removed or not.

"When I was in fourth grade," the sea captain said suddenly, "I stopped brushing my teeth for a year."

We all paused, forks poised mid-air.

"What?" the husband said.

"Well, I decided that dogs never brushed their teeth and it never hurt them, so why should I brush my teeth?" the sea captain answered.

"But how did you keep it from your parents?" the children's book author asked, incredulous.

"It wasn't easy," the sea captain said. "Plus, I liked to eat sugar cubes. When I finally went to the dentist, I had eight cavities. And that was that."

We roared with laughter.

The Swedish word for the day is tandborste. It means toothbrush.

- by Francis S.

2008-03-24T10:38:00.002+01:00

The rain in Spain does not stay mainly in the plain. It hits the mountains and the coast, too. At least it does in Marbella, Spain's answer to the posher parts of Miami Beach. Of course, there was sunshine there as well, and the husband and I each managed to turn our own particular shades of pink.

I hadn't been back to Spain for eight years or so. But it's the same - the arguing, the promenading, the little coffees cut with milk, the cured hams, the tile floors, the tiny bird-like old ladies in sweater sets and knee-length wool skirts and sensible shoes with low heels (who have replaced their mothers, long-dead, who wore heavy black widows' weeds), the strange love of creepy public ceremonies, from the painfully slow Holy Week parading of saints by men disguised in peaked black hats to homo-eroto-quasi-fascisto-pseudo-military displays of other men shouting weird orders at each other as they march 20 meters, back and forth, on a small stretch of street with hundreds watching.

Spain has such a peculiar pulse, fluttering and sluggish at the same time. Odd, that. If Spain were a person, she would be one of those types who rushes around the apartment madly cleaning, only to fall exhausted on the couch before jumping up to clean some more.

It was only four days - we were celebrating the 60th birthday of the mother of A. the TV producer. But it seemed much longer and so far away. Especially when we got back to the coldest weather of the year in Stockholm, and snow.

The Swedish phrase for the day is röda dagar. It literally means red days, which are how holidays are marked on Swedish calendars, and has become the commonly used expression for public holidays. Of which there are two for Easter: Good Friday and the Monday following Easter - and in many cases, an extra half a day before as well, since offices tend to let people out early on days before a holiday.

- by Francis S.

2008-03-14T18:00:00.002+01:00

What makes this year's Eurovision Song Contest different from all other years?

This year, the husband and I are going to the dress rehearsal of the finale of the Swedish competition, Melodifestivalen.

I expect it will be as trashy as ever. And it's going to be hell, because I can't bring a blanket into the arena to pull over my head when the singing is just too awful to bear.

Check this space for updates.

The Swedish word for the day is paljetter. It means sequins.

- by Francis S.

2008-03-10T21:33:00.008+01:00

Last week I went to the opera on Wednesday - by myself as I'd gotten a last-minute ticket someone had returned to a sold-out performance - and on Thursday to a hockey game - it was Djurgården versus Linköping, and I went with my favorite Finn.

As I watched the game, I racked my brain to figure what opera and hockey have in common. I watched the guys racing around the ice - it's far harder to keep up with than soccer, since everyone moves at twice the speed at least, and the puck is probably 20 times smaller than a soccer ball. I tried to remember the last hockey game I'd gone to, which was nearly 40 years ago. The Chicago Blackhawks. I don't even remember if they won.

"This isn't the most exciting game," the Finn said, despite the score going from 3-0 to 3-4. "I think it's because both teams already know they're going to the playoffs and where they stand."

To be honest, I have little idea what makes for an exciting game. It seemed exciting enough to me, all those 20-year-olds racing around on the ice, slamming each other into the boards, breaking their sticks or having to be escorted off the ice because they've seriously hurt a leg.

But as the minutes ran down, the question remained: What do opera and hockey have in common?

All I could see were the differences. Opera isn't a team sport, it's formal and hifalutin, the coaches are nowhere to be seen, there are no winners or losers - well, maybe when the mezzo can barely maneuver a long set of intricately curving sixteenth notes, the audience loses, although if she can compensate with the cadenza, which is nearly as long as the aria, then maybe she's redeemed herself and the audience didn't lose after all.

Then again, I suppose both opera and hockey require a certain amount of choreography, and they both have their divas. Everyone is wearing a costume that disguises them well, and both sets of players exude charisma and power and grace. And when played well, they give a sense of exhilaration.

I still vote for opera, big old homo that I am. It was a glorious staging of Orphée, highly stylized in the best way, and the painfully separated couple are ancient and grey and tired, which makes the story more about age and experience and regret, and less about youth and passion and loss.

Which is what hockey is about: youth and passion and loss. And winning of course. I guess youth and passion just don't hold my interest as well as age and experience and regret.

The Swedish words for the day is skillnad and likhet. They mean difference and similarity.

- by Francis S.

2008-02-29T08:29:00.004+01:00

The ancient Romans didn’t just have a leap day – which incidentally is also known as bissextus, a name that conjures interesting visions of a holiday in which teachers earnestly direct second graders to draw pictures of men and women randomly kissing men and women regardless of sex, bright crayon drawings that will be brought home proudly and put up with magnets on countless refrigerators across the land. Of course the origins of the name are more prosaic.

But I digress. The ancient Romans didn’t just have a leap day, they had a whole leap month – Mercedonius.

Interestingly, Mercedonius was inserted into random years at the end of the year after what the Romans considered the last month of the year, February.

Mercedonius wasn’t supposed to be added randomly, though. The head of state was the one who declared the Mercedonius, which instead of leaving it as a standard part of appropriate years, used it to his advantage to extend days in office for favored politicians. Which was a mess for the Roman population who had no idea when the year would end and the next year actually start. It was great for the head of state, though, several of whom later managed to get other months named after themselves: July for Julius Caesar and August for Augustus.

Does this remind anyone else of a certain American political party with grandiose ideas of power?

Maybe the U.S. will soon have a month called Bushius instead of July.

The Swedish word for the day is skottdagen, which was the Swedish word of the day four years ago. It means, of course, leap day. Or bissextus if that’s your orientation.

- by Francis S.

2008-02-20T08:08:00.001+01:00

The woman who sits in the desk next to mine arrived this morning with a suitcase. She’s off to Tallinn on an overnight cruise that includes all of seven hours in the Estonian capital, which is rumored to be quaint with a well-preserved, if rather small, old quarter surrounded by medieval walls.

I’ve never been to Tallinn, which I am ashamed of, since it’s so close. It used to sound so exotic to me. But how do you define exotic? If you make Scandinavia the center of your map, Krakow, St. Petersburg or Tallinn are hardly exotic destinations, none of which I’ve been to and all of which I feel I should visit, and soon before they change any more than they have already changed since the unravelling of the Iron Curtain.

But exotic or not isn’t even just a matter of geography. Thailand or the Canary Islands don’t fall under the exotic by Swedish standards either, since you can go to either place on the cheap. In fact, places ranging from the Gambia to Reykjavik to Petra no longer seem remote, living in a land where people think one of the basic human rights is the right to travel to far-flung places. Or at least far-flung places with lots of sun.

So what is exotic anymore? Antarctica? The moon?

The Swedish word for the day is omöjligt. It means impossible.

- by Francis S.

2008-02-17T19:37:00.004+01:00

Last night, as we ate dinner with A., the TV producer, C., the fashion photographer, the former punk star and the carpenter, I thought about how I had never noticed much, until I moved to Sweden, how people hold a knife and fork.

In America, we all seem to use the same awkward method of cutting with a knife in the right hand, and then switching places, putting the fork in the right hand, scooping up the piece or spearing it so it can be safely transferred into our greedy mouths. Back and forth and back forth we go with the knife and fork, regardless of class or upbringing as far as I've ever noticed.

Of course, I grew up also cutting softer things with the side of the fork, which I think is rather a no-no in polite society, and my mother never said a word about letting the spoon click noisily against my teeth when eating soup either. After all, I am the grandson of Iowa farmers. On both sides of the family, in fact. We eat quickly and efficiently in my family, as if it were in our genes to be worried about getting our fair share if we aren't fast enough.

Of course, when I moved to Sweden I saw that, as in every place outside the U.S., at least as far as I know, people eat with their fork in the left hand and knife in the right. The knife is held rather delicately like a pencil - which I'm not sure is a Scandinavian thing - and if necessary, is used to push and press food onto the back of the fork, if it is food that can't be speared. For the most part, unless eating a course that requires only a fork, the fork will stay in the left hand and the knife in the right, with people quite adept at using their left hand. When the course is finished, the knife and fork are returned, side-by-side, to the five o'clock position on the plate. Something that many are taught to do in the U.S., apparently, but not something I ever learned.

So, like a southerner deliberately dropping their accent upon moving north, or vice versa, I've learned to eat with my fork in my left hand, although I still switch hands mid-meal if the food really doesn't stay on the back of my fork long enough to make it into my poor mouth.

We finished the meal with a positively wicked chocolate bread pudding made with banana bread, which presented little problem for the vaguely utensil-challenged such as myself, since it is best eaten with a spoon. I did, however, make sure not to let the spoon click against my teeth.

The Swedish word for the day is artig. It means polite.

- by Francis S.

2008-02-13T19:35:00.003+01:00

The sun is the ruling deity of Sweden. Which isn't strange, this is a light-challenged country after all, big in space, small in population, and starved for daylight in winter. So, when everyone woke up to an ice-blue sky this morning, and the sun loping along sideways but visible, there was general rejoicing. It's as if everyone is walking two inches off the ground, as they promenade around. And everyone is promenading around on a day like today. I guess it's been particularly bad this year on account of we haven't had the ameliorating phenomenon of snow, which makes everything lighter.

So, bring it on, sun, give us all you got. You've got what, 5-6 billion years yet before you become a nasty red giant and burn us all to a crisp?

The Swedish word for the day is solsken. It means sunshine.

- by Francis S.

2008-02-11T18:52:00.000+01:00

It's out.

The latest book containing the words of Francis Strand, that is.

It's called Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wide Web, and it's a collection of writing from 27 blogs, chosen by Sarah Boxer, who has, among other things, served as web critic for the New York Times. I'm among illustrious company, including Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, and the wonderful Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker. The only blogs that I've really read before are the illustrious Language Log and Angry Black Bitch, whose writing is just the perfect balance of wit, fury and hilarity.

The book is getting mixed reviews - the London Review of Books was tepidly snarky (is that an oxymoron?), at best, while the L.A. Times gave it quite a nice write-up, by literature blogger Carolyn Kellogg. I haven't gotten my copies yet, so I can't judge for myself.

Sarah Boxer was interviewed on NPR for a piece broadcast on the Morning Edition on Christmas day. And she wrote quite a nice piece on blogging in the New York Review of Books, although there's a thread on her book and article on MeFi, with the usual pissing and moaning about old vs. new journalism and no one understanding what a real blog is. Blah blah blah. Blogs are an interesting phenomenon, no doubt, and they play their good citizen/bad citizen (that's like good cop/bad cop) role in the Republic of Information. But enough already. Who cares, really? They're basically just another something to read, and with luck, get a little knowledge or at least a few minutes of entertainment out of.

Sorry about the metablogging. I hate metablogging, I really do. There's nothing more tedious than to read about blogging in a blog.

So, to change the subject: On another self-congratulatory note, I've managed to shed six kilos since New Year's - and I hope to shed another four before we go to Spain in mid-March, putting me at 72 (that's just under 160 pounds for you Americans.)

The Swedish word for the day is snack. It means chat.

- by Francis S.

2008-02-08T18:03:00.002+01:00

A random passerby, looking up into a random window at Odengatan on Wednesday, might have been surprised to see a man playing a piano with a parrot on his shoulder.

That man would've been me.

The parrot would've been one Oliver, whose personal human slaves are the children's book author and his boyfriend the sea captain, who are on holiday in the Canary Islands. (Are there any Parrot Islands anywhere? That would've been a more appropriate place to vacation, I think. Although since they left the parrot behind, perhaps not.)

Things started out so well with Oliver.

But not an hour after the piano playing - he sang happily along to my Mompou Cançó i Dansa V with a sound like air escaping from a balloon - the situation had deteriorated. He was running along the back of the sofa in the TV room, free as a, um, bird, when for no reason I could discern, he jumped at me and bit my fingers.

Two days and three more nasty, bloody bites later (not to mention the chunk he took out of the husband), we have achieved a truce: Oliver stays in the cage, and we give him fresh water and food. We'll see how much things progress before his slaves arrive back to take him home.

The Swedish words for the day are papagoja and kris. They mean parrot and crisis. If you put them together into one word, you get papagojkrisen, which means the parrot crisis.

- by Francis S.

2008-01-26T19:38:00.000+01:00

Obvious Lesson No. 1: Do not go to see an, er, experimental theater piece called "Exquisite Pain."

Obvious Lesson No. 2: Especially if the name of the theater company doing the production is called "Forced Entertainment."

Picture this: two people sitting at two different desks next to each other on a small stage. The woman reads from a script, telling a story about having been jilted by a lover. The man reads from a script, telling a story about a man whose youngest and beloved brother has killed himself. The woman tells the same story about being jilted by her lover. The man tells a different story of sorrow. The woman repeats her story. And again, and again, and again. Fifty or so times. Pain is accurate to describe the experience - four of the hundred or so people in the theater walked out, and I watched them with terrible envy - and it was certainly forced. Self-indulgent and boring would also be an accurate description. Exquisite and entertainment, however, are words that should not be used within a thousand miles of this piece.

God help us, we stayed to the bitter end.

I guess I'm just a philistine.

The Swedish word for the day is och vi betalade. It means and we paid.

- by Francis S.

2008-01-15T08:31:00.000+01:00

What happens when you stay up late making merry with the sea captain and his boyfriend, the children's book author, of a Friday night, with good food and perhaps a little too much good drink (not me, I'm on a diet)?

You book a holiday weekend to Svalbard.

Svalbard, the northerly most point you can fly commercially, north of Siberia, north of Alaska and Canada, on the same latitude as the northern coast of Greenland.

The Swedish phrase for the day is är du tokig. It means are you crazy?

- by Francis S.

2008-01-06T21:41:00.000+01:00

The Twelfth Day of Christmas - no partridges or pear trees, though. Just the dim grey turning quickly into dark. And tomorrow is a school day.

I know I'll sleep badly tonight, tossing and turning and sweating my way to morning. It's a grim day, the first school day after a long holiday.

I wish I could put it off for a week.

The Swedish word for the day is trettondagen, which is what the Swedes call the Sixth of January, also known as Epiphany.

- by Francis S.

2008-01-04T09:23:00.000+01:00

All the preparations: the ordering of the plates and glasses, the buying of the food, the straightening of the apartment, the skewering of tomatoes and mozzarella and basil, the pulling apart of prosciutto, the cutting of figs and pears, the arraying of cheese, laying out of trays, the arranging of branches of red berries and pussy willows, then the doffing of crazy disco clothes complete with wigs and masks and a cheesy mustache grown for the occasion, which the husband insisted would have to be shaved off before going to sleep.

Then the people came, dressed up in their own crazy disco clothes and with masks we provided, and they drank champagne, and they ate, and they toasted in the New Year, and they danced and they laughed and they got drunk and they broke numerous glasses (I still found a stray shard of glass today in the dining room). And I felt like I hardly talked to anyone as I wafted through the apartment, pouring as much champagne as I drank, nibbling on a piece of cheese or dancing wildly for a minute or two, laughing at everyone and everything until before I knew it, it was 5:30 a.m. and it was all I could do to drag myself to bed with my cheesy mustache intact, leaving the husband to deal with the last remaining guests: one couple madly kissing on one of the sofas, another couple madly kissing on the dance floor, the rest of the crew dancing drunkenly, who apparently all left somewhere around 6 a.m.

It was the perfect way to see in 2008 and celebrate the light coming back into our little Swedish lives.

Sadly, I was undone by it all and unable to really get out of bed on Jan. 1 until early evening, leaving the husband to clean up the god-awful mess.

About the only thing I could manage was to shave off the mustache.

I still haven't fully recovered. I guess I'm getting old for such abandon.

The Swedish phrase of the day is fast det var värt det. Which means but it was worth it.

- by Francis S.

2007-12-24T12:45:00.000+01:00

Whence comes this rush of wings afar,
Following north the noel star?
Birds from the woods in wondrous flight,
Bethlehem seek this holy night.

The Swedish word for the day is julafton, which has been the word of the day before more than I once, I suspect. It means Christmas Eve, which is when Swedes celebrate.

Happy Christmas to you all.

- by Francis S.

2007-12-13T19:22:00.000+01:00

Supposedly, they are in memory of a third-century saint who had her eyes plucked out, but the Swedish celebrations honoring Lucia on her Saint's day, December 13, are really just the remnants of pagan mid-winter rites. A fact that I love. Girls in white dresses with wreathes on their heads and candles burning in their hair - it's very, er, druidic, isn't it? And this morning when I made my way past the main city library and on into the park beyond on my way to work, I found the pathways lit with thick-wicked candles in tins, blazing away in the murky winter morning dimness. It made my heart glad, it did.

Natten går tunga fjät runt gård och stuva
kring jord som sol'n förgät skuggorna ruva
Då i vårt mörka hus stiger med tända ljus
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.

The night walks heavily round hearth and home,
Around the earth the sun leaves the woods brooding
Then in our dark houses walks, bearing burning candles,
Saint Lucy, Saint Lucy.

There, you have the whole verse of a Swedish song for the day!

- by Francis S.

2007-12-03T21:09:00.001+01:00

Rufus Wainwright's voice is an acquired taste. Like black coffee or stout, dry vermouth on the rocks or oysters on the half shell. Some people never acquire it.

Me, I'm smitten.

I think it's the way his gravelly baritone and the intensely personal poetry of his words contrast with all that velvety rich campy goodness of his manner that does it for me.

Mr. Wainwright was in grand form last night at Cirkus in Stockholm (the perfect venue - as big as you can get while still being intimate). He was unfaltering: a bit of razzle dazzle, a bit of heartbreak, a bit of angry politics, the songs lush, brash or meltingly beautiful. He is a consummate musician.

I even forgave him coming out in the second half of the concert in lederhosen, a look that no one can really pull off, God only knows what possessed him to try (there's something vaguely national socialistic about lederhosen, isn't there? In his defense, he did say something about not being able to afford a video and his cheap alternative is costumes at his shows to add glamor and interest, which did make me laugh). He can, however, pull off the black- sheer- stockings- staggering- pumps- fedora- and- suitcoat- without- trousers look, which he did at the end of his encore, channelling Judy Garland singing "Get Happy," complete with his band jumping wildly around him, dressed in black suits and pink button-down-collar shirts.

The husband, A. the TV producer and I wafted out of the theater on a glittery cloud of bliss.

Oh, Mr. Wainwright. You're really something, you are.

The Swedish word for the day is euforisk. It means euphoric, of course.

- by Francis S.

2007-11-28T07:57:00.000+01:00

There are so many in-between moments in life, like the walk to work or plane ride to a meeting in Amsterdam. And I’ve tended to think of trips to Chicago to my parents as a kind of in-between moment, but that’s the wrong way to look at them. Really they’re more like mortar holding together the bricks of my life.

I never miss the U.S. when I’m at home in Stockholm, but a visit to Chicago – last week it was with the husband, the priest and the policeman and their five-year-old, who is our goddaughter – almost always leaves me feeling sentimental, melancholy and wanting more. I brood, for some reason thinking about all the times of my life where things seem to be at the hinge of a door, about to open onto one thing and close on another. Like the whole crazy seven months I lived in Barcelona, which were a prelude to moving to Sweden, looking back on it. Despite the brooding, it’s a lovely bittersweet feeling.

But what makes the visit mortar, I suppose, is that it brings me back to my most fundamental self, where I came from and what makes me me. As if the Stockholm me were some other me, which it isn’t. It’s the same me. Well, maybe just slightly different, sort of laid on top of the other me with the edges not quite matched.

The Swedish word for the day is lager. It means layer.

- by Francis S.

2007-11-16T21:12:00.000+01:00

Christmas is on its way: They're selling julmust - I'm a sucker for the bizarre grapey, Dr. Peppery, coca cola-y fizzy concoction that is julmust, sold only at Christmastime in Sweden - a sure sign. Without Thanksgiving in Sweden, the only way to know that the season has started is when julmust appears.

The Swedish word for the day is trettioåtta. It means 38, which is how many days are left before Christmas.

- by Francis S.

2007-11-04T21:53:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was All Saint's Day here - yet another religious holiday in a country of atheists and agnostics - and I practiced my saintliness by not letting the husband's foul mood get the better of me. True, he was suffering from a flu, but he'd been on the brink for a week and staying up until 3 a.m. at a champagne tasting party on Friday where there was little food pushed him over the edge.

Getting sick due to staying up until 3 a.m. drinking champagne and not eating kind of dampens my empathy, but only just a skosh. I had not attended the champagne tasting, of course, because I had just recovered from the flu myself and decided I just wasn't quite up for it. And I can't really tell whether he got the bug from me, or whether I got the bug from him, since he was feeling dicey before I got it.

Anyway, on Saturday morning, while the husband was all snippy and grim-faced, I was all halo-y and dulcet-toned, running down to the grocery across the street to get him cranberry juice and rice pudding. Then, knowing it was best to let him seethe in his own phlegm, I left for a day-long movie marathon that we were both supposed to go to, although I only really stayed for some previews and one movie before making my apologies and taking off, saint that I am, explaining that the husband had stewed enough alone and needed someone to make sure he was actually eating something.

Then, saint that I am, as I walked past the Hedvig Eleonora Church, I saw that they were singing the Duruflé Requiem and I just had to go in and listen, abandoning all thoughts of the husband (well, maybe not all thoughts, but most of them. I figured he could do without me for another hour or so). I'd never been in the church before, and although it's rather beautiful on the outside, with its dome and churchyard, inside it's kind of ugly.

But the singing, the singing was sublime.

Very French, just this side of being too sweet and blurred, the requiem is a bear of a thing to sing, I know from experience. I'm sure the choir felt very saintly and satisfied with themselves for conquering it. I know I felt like a saint, a veritable St. Theresa, and I don't mean like Mother Theresa, I mean like the St. Theresa in that Bernini statue where she seems to be in the throes of the, um, Holy Spirit, who it would appear knows what women really want.

The Swedish phrase for the day is alla helgons dag. It means All Saints' Day.

- by Francis S.

2007-11-03T21:41:00.000+01:00

Sweden has gone crazy for Facebook in the last two months. God only knows why. But who cares, because now, thanks to Stefan Geens, Mr. Ogle Earth, I have my own application on Facebook - the Swedish word of the day. Cool, huh?

The Swedish word for the day is ordet, which means the word.

- by Francis S.

2007-10-15T18:23:00.000+02:00

I just got back from Vegas.

At least I think it was Vegas, it all seems pretty hazy. I remember losing my sweater in the airport (the expensive one I bought in Copenhagen) and then a short conference, and waking up throughout the night and finishing this huge 800-page book I bought and being reduced to reading magazines about all the scary shows and weird shit that is Las Vegas, and then going back to the airport where the constant electronic plinging of the slot machines, which you can't escape, is enough to drive you crazy. Over the intercom, some guy announced "Will the person who left their false teeth and hearing aid in the men's room please come claim them, if you can hear this message..." and then later "will the person who dropped $5000 held together with a yellow rubber band please come to information where we have your yellow rubber band." Yeah, funny, right. But everyone laughed. Then I got on the red eye to Chicago, slept the whole way, landed and took a cab to my parents, where I took a shower and had a birthday brunch for my brother with the whole Chicago branch of the family. We ate, talked a bit, then I went right back to the airport where I got on yet another plane and came back to Stockholm, arriving yet again at the crack of ass. All in roughly four and a half days.

So tell me, those of you who are serious travellers, how do you do it, with all the time changes and the bad air in planes and hotels, and the trauma of going through "security" - yeah, it's necessary, but why the hell to they yammer on stridently about it being an "orange threat level," I mean, what is an orange threat level exactly and what are we supposed to do about it?

The Swedish word for the day is bortrest. It means away travelling.

- by Francis S.

2007-10-05T07:51:00.000+02:00

Why should it surprise me that Pacifica Radio doesn't want to broadcast Allan Ginsburg reading his poem "Howl" - one of the greatest of poems in the American canon - because they are scared of being fined by the FCC.

It's all due to crackdowns since the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction, apparently. It is amazing that despite the poem being the subject of a celebrated 1957 obscenity case, some 50 years later it is again being repressed, in effect.

Watching the U.S. from the other side of the Atlantic, I can't help wondering: What the hell is going on over there? Secret legal decisions advocating torture, no health insurance for poor kids, puritanical censorship - I understand that people aren't out in the streets demanding change - there are so many awful things happening at once it's overwhelming.

The Swedish word for the day is avsky. It means disgust.

- by Francis S.

2007-09-23T22:11:00.000+02:00

When people get married in Denmark, they crowd around the bride and groom when they waltz their first waltz, pushing in close, clapping and laughing and singing along, and then they pick up the groom and take off his shoes and cut off the toes of his socks with scissors.

At least, that's what happened at yesterday's wedding in Copenhagen. And the Danish woman laughing next to me told me that they always do this at weddings.

But, a nearly eight-month pregnant bride dressed in scarlet is apparently not the typical Danish way of doing things. Nor is making a toast with everyone standing on their chairs and their left foot up on the table. And nor is serving cheese to 165 people instead of wedding cake for dessert.

Everything was perfection, though, down to the last detail.

The food was a marvel, mouth-watering fish with mousseline sauce and pickled green tomatoes, glazed veal with little vegetables and broad-leaf parsley purée, all served to 165 people at once and at the perfect temperature by Babette, who is a man, and who did the food styling for the movie Babette's Feast.

Then we danced to some band that we had never heard of but is apparently No. 2 or something in Denmark (the women, aged 15 to 75, were swooning), and then a dj, until our suits were nearly soaked through with sweat and A. the TV producer was in severe pain from her high heels, dancing until nearly 3 a.m., before taking our leave from the bride (who was reclining on a victorian sofa brought in expressly for her to recline on), and getting on a boat that brought us back to our hotel just down the street from the Amalienborg Palace.

It was only a weekend, and an hour's airplane ride away, but it felt like another world.

The Swedish word for the day, which has been the word a number of times, I have no doubt, is bröllop, which means of course wedding.

- by Francis S.

2007-09-20T22:01:00.000+02:00

On our way to the release party for the gay cookbook (When I tried to explain to C. how food can be gay, I had to admit it's not the food but the photos of men frolicking about nearly naked that make the cookbook gay), we saw a woman walking a pig about the size of a pug, bold as could be, down Storgatan, across from Annakhan.

"Yeah, it's a miniature pig now," said E., the bouncer. "But feed that pig enough and it will be huge."

She is so very right. Miniature pig is another word for piglet.

The Swedish word for the day is gris, which means pig, and should not be confused with pigg, which means alert or bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

- by Francis S.

2007-09-14T19:53:00.000+02:00

On the way to work, I passed a bicycle with a purple sparkly banana seat and monkey handlebars. With the rush of Proust's madeleine dipped in lime twig tea, I was brought back to 1971, when girls wore knit ponchos and boys had bangs and everyone drove a bicycle with monkey handlebars and sparkly banana seats. Mine was blue, bought by my parents at Sears, and I was ashamed of it because it was far too elaborate, with glittery hand grips with plastic streamers and a sissy bar on the back. But I rode it to school anyway.

Can it be possible that banana seats back?

The Swedish verb for the day is att cykla. It means to ride a bicycle.

- by Francis S.

2007-09-07T07:49:00.000+02:00

I woke up this morning and, opening the venetian blinds in the study, I was horrified to see that the trees on the hills of Observatorielunden across the street were well on their way to turning gold.

It is only early September. At least it says it is early September on my calendar.

Is it possible for the leaves to change this early?

The Swedish word for the day is färg. It means color.

- by Francis S.

2007-08-19T17:26:00.000+02:00

When I was 13, my parents flew the whole family from Chicago to the West Coast of the U.S. for a holiday, where we spent three weeks travelling, starting in San Francisco (where I saw my first drag queen, in a green-sequined evening gown at 7 a.m. at a donut shop, and I didn't even realize she was a man until my sister told me) and ending up in Bellingham and briefly, Vancouver.

One of the highlights of the trip was visiting family friends, who lived in a house in Portland, Oregon that had almost everything I ever would have wanted in a house: front and back stairs, a secret room behind a set of sliding bookcases, and a dumbwaiter.

The only thing missing was an elevator.

Of course now I live in an apartment building with a tiny elevator big enough for four people at the most, as old as the building itself - 100 years - with a gate that you pull shut, and wooden panelling, a mirror, and little leather seats that fold down if you feel faint on your way up to your apartment and simply must sit down.

Some people find old elevators a bit scary, worried that they'll break down and leave you stuck between floors.

They don't worry me. I love them. I feel like I'm in an old movie.

The only thing missing is a little old man in a cap at the controls, who doesn't even have to ask me which floor because he already knows.

The Swedish word for the day is hiss, which is Swedish for elevator, of course.

2007-08-13T19:16:00.000+02:00

I look forward to the day that I no longer care about how big my stomach is. But until then, I'm still too young and vain, at 46, to feel that I want to look any older than I already do with my sparse grey hair and the bags under my eyes.

So when A. the TV producer suggested going on a diet together, I agreed.

But then on Friday a crew from London descended on our apartment to take photographs for a chocolate campaign. It was like a child's dream come true - a huge suitcase filled with chocolate: creams and truffles and tremendous slabs.

When they left at the end of the day, there were kilos of the stuff in the kitchen still.

Bad timing, that.

So, I'm taking a holiday from the diet, at least until the chocolate is gone.

Is it possible to be in heaven and hell at the same time?

The Swedish word for the day is efterrätt. It means dessert.

- by Francis S.

2007-08-01T18:42:00.001+02:00

Rummaging around in the refrigerator, I noticed that we have 18 jars of jam.

Well, actually, I took them out and counted them: one rhubarb and ginger jam, one rhubarb and vanilla conserve, one cherry jam, one lemon marmalade, one blueberry jam, one blackberry jam, one black raspberry jam, one strawberry jam, one raspberry jam, one Countess' jam (which is apple and elderflower), one cloudberry jam, one apricot and pinenut conserve, one fig conserve, two lemon curd, two ginger marmalade, two orange marmalade... not to mention one jar of cranberry sauce and one jar of jellied lingonberries.

Good god, what can two people possibly need with all that jam?

It makes me think of the film Hope and Glory and the scene when the father comes home on leave from the German front and hacks open a can of German jam that he's somehow gotten hold of. The mother doesn't want any of the children to eat it, because she thinks it's been poisoned. "They know we're mad for jam," she cries.

The Swedish word for the day is sylt, which means of course jam.

- by Francis S.

2007-07-30T23:08:00.000+02:00

When A. the TV producer was a little girl, she was cast as an extra in Fanny and Alexander, which I saw in Toronto when it was first released in 1983 - I suppose it was one of the only things Swedish that ever stuck in my mind in all the years before I moved here, the part in the movie when the whole family dances through the grand apartment hand in hand singing "nu är det jul igen."

Which means I would've seen her long before I met her - a strange thought, that.

But A. wasn't in the movie because she got the flu, and Bergman didn't want her on the set. Still, she remembers talking with him before she got sick.

Me, I've never met him, I've just seen a couple of movies and a play... I suppose one of the few advantages of knowing this obscure language is being able to see Ingmar Bergman pieces and not need subtitles.

But now there won't be any more plays, since Ingmar Bergman died today. I guess he's gone to the big green room in the sky where difficult and demanding directors go.

The Swedish word for the day is geni. It means genius.

- by Francis S.

2007-07-24T07:45:00.000+02:00

Wow. Apparently, the fact that when I'm drifting off to sleep or wake up in the middle of the night with an irrepressible urge to move my legs is due to my broad complex-tramtrack-bric-a-brac-domain 9 gene. Says the New York Times in an article about the discovery of the connection between the broad-complex tramtrack-bric-a-brac-domain 9 gene and, er, restless legs syndrome:

The new findings may also make restless legs syndrome easier to define, resolving disputes about how prevalent it really is. The disorder is a “case study of how the media helps make people sick,” two researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, wrote recently in the journal PLoS Medicine. They argued that its prevalence had been exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies and uncritical newspaper articles, and that giving people diagnoses and powerful drugs were serious downsides of defining the elusive syndrome too broadly.

Discovery of the genetic basis of the disorder “puts restless legs syndrome on a firmer footing,” said Dr. Christopher Earley, a physician at Johns Hopkins University who treats the malady.

Don't you love Dr. Earley's little joke? The copyeditors at the Times are obviously slacking off on their job to be as stuffy as possible.

I wonder if I'll get more sympathy from the husband now. Doubtfully, since he's the one who really suffers.

The Swedish word for the day is ben. It is both the singular and plural form for leg.

- by Francis S.

2007-07-02T11:13:00.000+02:00

I think I've recovered from midsummer.

It only took me over a week. I guess that's what happens when you get old and you go to a party that lasts 15 hours, complete with princess and television personalities and minor celebrities of one sort and another, a liberal sprinkling of Monagasques, guests who arrived by helicopter, dances round the maypole, competitions that included one of the guests ripping off her top to reveal her (very expensive) perfect breasts as she hammered a nail into a board, screaming like a Valkyrie the whole time, lots and lots of herring (which amazingly, I think I'm starting to almost appreciate), barbecue, five hours of dancing wildly in a barn done up for the occasion, and lots and lots and lots of alcohol, almost too much in fact, I thought, my head on my chest and eyes closed as we made our way home in a taxi at 4:30 a.m. in broad daylight.

My friend the cat doctor, who had come along for the ride at the behest of A. the TV producer, was entranced, having me take pictures of him with the princess (to my husband's everlasting humiliation), yakking it up with people who are world-famous in Sweden unbeknownst to him, giving advice on a cat that was shown to him ("It looks like it has allergies, but perhaps you should have a vet look at it..."), trying to avoid an expatriate Swedish woman with a bit too much silicon in her lips who periodically terrorized him.

Me, I had a marvelous time, I haven't danced that much in ages.

The Swedish phrase for the day is helt utmattad. It means completely zonked.

- by Francis S.