''The bells of hell go ting-aling-aling, for you but not for me.
And the little devils how they sing-aling-aling, for you but not for me.
O, death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling? O, grave thy victor-ee?''

(WWI trench song.)

It's invariably wonderful to have dinner with the priest and her boyfriend the policeman. You sometimes learn some interesting facts, too. For instance, among many topics for the evening, death was discussed by these two people whose jobs require them to deal with death on a regular basis. A difficult client, death is. But sometimes more bizarre than frightening.

For instance, the priest told us very briefly about speaking at the annual conference of Sveriges kyrkogård- och krematorieförbund, which roughly translates to Sweden's Cemetery and Crematorium Association, which is apparently a society of funeral directors.

The priest gets asked to speak all the time by various organizations, to be interviewed by television or newspapers, gets called on to sit on community panels, etc. because they're always looking for a priest who's not an old white guy. Of course, she happens to be a personable, thoughtful and natural speaker, which is why she keeps getting asked over and over.

Anyway, the funeral directors wanted her to speak about the church's current thinking on funerals or something along those lines. Instead she talked about what it takes for people to work with death all the time.

''They seemed to like what I said even though it wasn't what they asked for,'' she said. ''But the scary thing was, they all looked so waxy and pale. They looked like corpses themselves.''

And, though there were various, uh, ancillary products at the conference, such as pencils with ''Sveriges kyrkogård och-krematorieförbund'' printed on the side (she took one, of course), those attending the conference were, er, dead serious.

''I don't think they ever joke about death,'' she said.

Her boyfriend, the policeman, who had had to spend a day at the morgue as part of his training, said that the atmosphere is rather different there.

''Yeah, they joke around all right,'' he said. ''It's the only way to handle it. But the worst thing is the smell, and it stays in your clothes.''

The Swedish phrase for the day is begravningsentreprenör. It means mortician.

- by Francis S.

The letter that I'd been expecting from the ex has arrived.

It was mostly what I thought it would be: full of apology and regret, an unspoken request for some kind of absolution, all underpinned by the fact that five and a half years after our breakup, he hasn't yet let go of it. Of us.

A reply is necessary, but it will be difficult to balance giving him what he wants, accepting responsibility for my own role in the whole thing, and telling him to get on with his life already, which in part means leaving me alone.

If we'd been in touch all along, things might be different. But it hasn't been that way at all. He was pretty nasty the last contact we had, and that was three years ago.

I can tell I'm going to proscrastinate on writing this letter.

- by Francis S.

Ouch ouchity ouch ouch ouch. What a week of negotiating contracts, dealing with, er, personnel issues, making sales presentations, rewriting articles, assigning last- minute photos, setting up yearly budgets, and constantly putting out countless fires of one sort or another. Which all seems a bit pointless if something big and nasty is going to happen, as the FBI assures us is certain.

But at least the main magazine I edit got a great review in a big Swedish trade weekly - they said it was hip, mouth-watering (!), tough, American (which was a compliment, I guess), thorough. Happiness, indeed.

Now we're off to dinner with the priest and her boyfriend, the policeman. In true Swedish fashion, it should be a most cozy end to the week, complete with candles, lots of cigarettes and lots of red wine.

The Swedish word for the day is full. It means drunk, among other things. It should not be confused with ful, which means ugly.

- by Francis S.

I have just read the funniest thing I have ever read on a blog: a riff on moms and blogs, which I got to via an equally funny riff on, well, just plain moms. The gist of the first one was a sort of nightmare fantasy about one man's mom's blog.

Unfortunately, my own mother could not possibly compete. Her blog would no doubt look something like this:

posted by sylvia at 10:04:15 AM

posted by sylvia at 10:04:31 AM

posted by sylvia at 10:04:48 AM

posted by sylvia at 10:05:01 AM

posted by sylvia at 10:05:23 AM

The behind the scenes one-sided dialog accompanying this would sound something like this:

''I keep writing but it keeps disappearing!''

''Shit!'' (said in such a voice that you know the speaker isn't comfortable using such language)

''I know I'm doing it right, but this computer is so stupid...''

(gutteral and explosive sounds of disgust)

''These things don't make any sense! How can people use these things?''

''You couldn't make me touch this thing with a ten-foot pole! I'm never doing this again, never!''

(loud knocking around and shoving of the chair roughly into its place under the desk)


The Swedish word for the day is hysterisk. You could probably guess that this means hysterical.

- by Francis S., who loves his mother

I've never been nervous about flying, although for awhile there I was a little superstitious in my own peculiar way: Whenever I was in a plane during takeoff, I convinced myself that the only reason this huge hunk of steel was rising into the air was because I was willing it to rise by sheer force of my personal belief that, yes, it could fly. I knew this wasn't true, rationally, but I had to tell myself this. That is the definition of a superstition, I suppose.

I don't do this anymore, and I don't think I'm going to start again. And, as I said, I'm not nervous about flying. I used to have a sort of morbid fascination with plane crashes, however, nothing more than most people have. But now I just feel sad when I hear about crashes like this (an English-language article is here). And of course, living in a little country such as Sweden, I know someone who knows someone who was on the plane. Then again, I knew someone who knew someone who was on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, not to mention knowing someones who knew someones who were in the buildings themselves. Which gets at the real reason, I suspect, that this makes me feel sadder than usual. It's disaster happening on top of disaster. It's all wearying.

The Swedish word for the day is olycka. It means accident.

- by Francis S.

I've noticed in the past few days an extraordinary number of people with an .edu extension visiting here. Which is odd. Is the name of the site misleadingly educational sounding (uh, probably)? Did this site mistakenly end up in some kind of Swedish-language resource list for university students? What is it? Not that I'm complaining... just curious is all.

- by Francis S.

It's creeping up again, the smoking. After the usual New Year's quit-smoking resolution I managed to really cut down the smoking so that it was merely an accompaniment to alcohol, basically to ensure when I'd actually consumed too much alcohol that my hangover would be really nasty - there's nothing like a hangover from red wine and cognac augmented by about 15 cigarettes and, as a special touch, a cigar.

But during the trip to Greece I suddenly found myself smoking just any old time. I vowed to stop when I got back, but I didn't really and I've starting having one after lunch on a regular basis, not to mention one in the afternoon, one before dinner and several after dinner... the road from after-lunch smoking to before-breakfast smoking is frighteningly short. And once you've reached the point of before breakfast, you're going to have to start from the beginning again.

The first Swedish word for the day is suck. It means sigh. The second Swedish word for the day is suga. It means suck.

- by Francis S.

One day when I was 13, my eighth-grade social studies teacher, Miss Eytalis, drew on the blackboard a long line with a large dot marking each of the ends. She then said, "One solution to the world's hunger problem would be for America to get rid of all its pets and to send all their food to the countries who need it." I remember she was just barely smiling, it was a dark, hooded smile. "I'd like you to go up to the board and put a mark on the line as to how much you agree or disagree that this would be a good idea to help the world," she said. "The point on the left is for completely disagree, and the point on the right is if you completely agree."

This would have been 1974, a time when children were posed these kinds of questions in the eight grade, when you could take a class called ''Emerging Nations'' in your freshman year of high school, a time when no self-respecting person even knew when the senior prom was supposed to take place, a time when I was learning about the system of checks and balances, and who the cabinet secretaries were (Earl Butz was Secretary of Agriculture!) as the president of the U.S. was resigning because of a break-in at the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate hotel.

Well, as we each took our turns putting a mark on the blackboard, it rather quickly became apparent that every last damned one of my classmates had put their marks on the far left - completely disagree - and I was the sole person to put my mark elsewhere, which was exactly in the middle of the line. And Miss Eytalis was no help either, I don't remember her saying much of anything.

I do remember my disbelief at this, and my inability to get anyone to see my point of view at all, and how they all thought I was some kind of barbarian.

Of course, my parents grew up on farms where the philosophy was that animals belonged outside. Perhaps this colored my opinion. But I was incredulous that they thought animals were more important than people.

What this has to do with anything, I don't know. I just suddenly remembered it.

- by Francis S.

It's so odd to read that Iran's government is working behind the scenes to somehow alleviate the current situation, despite its public rhetoric condemning the latest bombing in Afghanistan (not that I, uh, condemn them for condemning...). It makes me want to cry, somehow, reading this. Of course I'm anthropomorphizing a country, turning it into a bad little boy who really wants to be good underneath but has been pushed too far, yet suddenly manages to do something constructive. Still, it gives me a sudden rush of hope, deep but fleeting.

- by Francis S.

Okay, so now there's been a retaliatory act of war. Tit for tat, although it's not entirely clear to me that this, uh, tit is being dropped on the same people who committed the tat. Or what good exactly this is supposed to do. Especially considering that the U.S. seems totally unprepared to protect itself on its own turf, the Office of Homeland Security (why ever did they pick such an Orwellian name?) being such a new agency and all.

There is no Swedish word for today.

- by Francis S.

It's peculiar how different cultures handle words, feel about them, and even stranger, how they incorporate words from other cultures.

For instance, we just watched ''Tillsammens'' (Together), a movie that came out last year and was probably the most popular Swedish-made movie over the past 12 months. In short, it's about people living in a group house in Stockholm in 1975. The movie goes to great pains to accurately recreate the past (the husband was extremely impressed that they found the proper beer cans, for instance). We hadn't seen it because I really wanted to see it with English subtitles, but we could only find DVDs with the usual Nordic subtitles - I finally said let's get it, I'll use the Swedish subtitles (which did work just fine). I liked it, it was even somewhat evocative for me, reminding me of when I used to visit my sister in Ann Arbor when I was 14 and she lived in a group house.

Of course, it wasn't nearly as evocative of that time for me as ''The Ice Storm'' - Cristina Ricci wearing a knit poncho and riding her bicycle with its banana seat, all those huge wooded lots with cold glass houses, the built-in furniture with uncomfortable coire carpeting, that is exactly what it was like where I grew up in suburban Chicago.

But I'm straying from the original topic. ''Tillsammens'' was directed by Lucas Moodysson, who also directed a movie that was released in the States as ''Show me love.''

Interestingly enough, the movie had a different title here: ''Fucking Åmal.''

Which brings me to the question of language. Swedes do have their own swear words - some of the expressions are rather endearing as they like to say things such as ''fan också'' or ''skit också, which translate respectively into ''damn, too!'' and ''shit, too!. People seem to find these somewhat effective and don't find them, well, sort of cute as I do. But, they are much more impressed with words like ''fuck.'' And ''knulla,'' the Swedish translation, just doesn't seem to cut it for them.

But what is most interesting is that Swedish swear words are used all the time on television. So are English swear words, for that matter. Swedes just don't seem to find this kind of language improper for television. They don't find nudity improper either - but then, they seem to separate nudity from sex here, not that they find sex necessarily improper for television either (well, not graphic sex of course).

In fact, the main thing they find improper for television is violence.

All in all, a rather healthy attitude if you ask me.

If you feel you need further lessons in swearing in Swedish, try this site.

- by Francis S.

The city shines right now, lovely with that soft sideways golden light of the late afternoon, the buildings making showy reflections in the Baltic, the cobblestones and the castle muted, all of it soft perfect imperfection as seen through the ancient watery glass of the windows of the office.

It's strange, glass. It seems so solid but it actually isn't, it's slowly being pulled by gravity as if it were liquid, and the top parts of the glass in old windows is much thinner than the bottom parts, a fact I just learned in the past six months. And I've already forgotten who told me.

The Swedish word for the day is skönhet. It means beauty.

-by Francis S.

I'm home sick with a nasty cold, trolling the Net and perusing old blog entries. I realize I've hardly written about the husband, except in passing and to note that he is a true arbiter of fashion here in Sweden.

Of course, there's nothing ickier than reading about requited love or happy marriages - or happy families, for that matter; as Tolstoy said, all happy families are alike, although I'd be willing to take that one on sometime.

No one wants to hear that I still marvel over my husband after three years (I admit, that isn't very long - I was 13 years with the ex), I marvel at his beauty, all his handsome Mediterranean features, those perfect lips and striking green eyes, the dark hair on his arms and his small hands. I love that he is wise and kind and thoughtful and yet a perfectionist, that he loves things of beauty himself - he has to in his business - and yet he's never taken in merely by the surface of things.

Otherwise he wouldn't be with me, an extremely average-looking person who is eight years older, who can't buy clothes unless he's with me, who is sloppier (but our apartment is spic and span, if you ignore the hall which is filthy from workmen, and the fine coating of dust in the kitchen, also courtesy of the workmen - it's mostly my desk at work that's a mess), who is a good 10 kilos more than when we met at a club in Barcelona when he was on vacation and I was living there (well, I was too skinny then anyway, but not 10 kilos too skinny).

And thank god he looks beyond the surface because I am wildly in love with him.

The Swedish word for the day is kärlek. It means, of course, love.

-by Francis S., hopeless sentimental

I don't want to go home. Mainly because our apartment is still being worked on. We have no heat (and it's somewhere around 10 degrees farenheit outside), no shower and no toilet in the apartment. (The shower and toilet are on the ground floor, actually, and we share it with the rest of the building. You'd think it would be great exercise, going up and down those cold, hard, stone steps all the time, but I don't seem to have lost an ounce.)

Of course the contractor says that they are running late. But are they allowed to leave us without heat when it's this cold? Surely there is some Draconian Swedish law that prevents this from happening - maybe one that puts bad contracters into work-release jail sentences wherein they have to fix the cobblestones in the old town, Gamla Stan, using rusting and ancient equipment that sounds like a thousand claws on a chalkboard.

The Swedish phrase for the day is att frysa ihjäl. It means to freeze to death.

- by Francis S.

I keep forgetting to write about my stalker story, which goes something like this:

A couple of weeks ago, my mobile phone rang and on the other end was a voice speaking in low tones, and about all I could understand were the words ''Daniel'' and ''hetalinjen.''

I said, jag tror att du har ringt fel* and the voice went on and I soon had to switch to English, I just couldn't understand the whispering voice.

It turned out that this Daniel seemed to think that we had talked on the previous Friday and I had given him my phone number. I said that I would not likely have been talking on any, er, hotline given that I was on my way from Athens to Stockholm then.

But, he asked me, you are gay aren't you?

And I said, well, yes I am gay, but that has nothing to do with this. (Did my voice give it away or what? O, the shame... and then the shame at being ashamed because that is surely internalized homophobia, dammit!)

On the other end there was a silence, laden with disbelief that I was denying that I had talked to the insistent Daniel.

Nonetheless, he did finally get off the line.

The husband was not amused. Neither was I, actually, it was rather unnerving. My first thought was that it was a prank played by M. But the husband found this very unlikely. And actually, it seems a bit too nasty and not funny enough for him. So, we went to bed.

Then, to my horror, the next morning there was an SMS on my phone: CALL ME I,AM GAY YOU ARE GAY LET,S METT.CALL 55 55 55 DANIEL.

I had a stalker. Yikes!

I immediately sent an SMS back saying that I was happily married, that I wasn't interested, to leave me alone.

He has. But he's still out there, somewhere. The weird thing is how did he get my number? I see three possibilities: first, someone else could have pulled my number out of thin air, a mere coincidence; second, it could still be a joke, though no one's admitted to that as of yet; third, it could be someone actually trying to get between me and the husband. (I do think it's probably the first, he sounded awfully young and scared.) But I've got his number, literally, so if he calls again it's straight to the police (that's what my friend Å. said, ''straight to the police'' were her very words).

The Swedish word for the day is läskigt, which means creepy.

-by Francis S.
*I believe you have the wrong number.

Oh, and here is a much more useful lesson in Swedish than you will ever find at this site, courtesy of Emma at Miramis, sister domain of Not My Muse, which also hosts Tread Softly. (There, that covers all the bases I hope for Anja, Lexi, et al.)

-by Francis S.

This blog twin thing seems kind of clique-y and, well, not being a member of any of the cliques that seem to exist in the blog world, adding my URL isn't likely to get me anything, and I'm not sure what the purpose of it is anyway except to get some extra attention. But, I shamelessly added my name anyway - I guess I still in my (assuredly pathetic when it comes to this kind of thing) soul want to be famous to 15 people, or famous to however many it takes to be declared a twin, although I can't for the life of me imagine who I could possibly be twinned with.

- by Francis S.

The regular fixed-line phone - as they say in the business - (as opposed to the mobile phone or cell phone, if you're reading this in the U.S.) is not working for some reason. Not that we're good about using this phone... I finally put a message on it saying that the caller should ring us on our mobile phones because we never listen to the message on the regular phone. (There will be an entire lesson later on Swedes and the use of mobile phones sometime in the near future.)

Anyway, when I woke up from my wool-tortured slumber at A.'s apartment last night, I noticed there was a message on my phone, which turned out to be my beloved little brother (who is, well, considerably bigger than I am, just littler in age, I guess) who had run into my ex on the street in D.C. They'd had lunch and now the ex wants my address in order to send me a letter. Which I suppose I will allow, since I'm curious as to what the hell he has to say to me. Our last communication was a letter from him that consisted of one sentence, - ''This is it.'' - and a check in payment for the grand piano that I'd sold with great difficulty because he wouldn't let me in the house in Dupont Circle, where the piano stood in the bay window, nor would he cooperate to be there at any specific time so possible buyers could stop in and see it. The whole thing was supposed to be negotiated through the next-door-neighbors, although I put my foot down on that and he finally relented. That particular letter seemed to succintly denote that, well, I shouldn't expect any more letters or send any of my own. Which was fine with me, if a little harsh in tone.

So, what the hell is he going to say now, more than five years after we split up?

And what the hell did he talk about at lunch with my poor little brother, who lived with us on several occasions and has, at best, rather ambivalent feelings about the ex, I'd suspect?

- by Francis S.

The weekend tastes so sweet after a long week - one of our two main English-language copyeditors was over here so I spent the week running meetings with her and every last damned editor at the office, first here in Stockholm and then down in Lund. This on top of the regular work that then has to be crammed in around the edges, including a session with a fellow invandrare - immigrant/ foreignerwho's only lived in Sweden six months and seems to be in a state of shock for a host of reasons, one of these being the deceptive similarity of Stockholm and its inhabitants to Anglo - U.K., U.S., Australian, Canadian, New Zealand - cultures: they are not the same at all, though they do appear quite similar on the surface, what with the excellent English-speaking skills, the t.v. programs from the U.S. (''The Sopranos'' and ''The West Wing'' and countless others), the music. That he doesn't need to prove himself in the way he's trying to prove himself, that he needs to tone it down in fact because in Sweden it's quite important not to seem to make yourself seem better than anyone else, and in fact its not at all the goal of people to become boss. I also had to make sure he realized that I'm not going to fire him because he's going through some kind of personal crisis and it's affecting his work.

Anyway, that was the week, in small part.

Then, when I arrived back from Lund at Arlanda airport, whisked the copyeditor and her husband into the train, got them checked back into the hotel, went back to the office at 5:30 and sent out some emergency e-mails because I hadn't had time to call a few people while I was down in Lund... after all this, we rushed off to A.'s apartment for dinner, which included S. and her new husband I., the son of Kurdish rebels (though he grew up in Sweden). I, quite rudely, zonked out on the couch shortly after the meal was finished (I blame the red wine), though I did manage to have some chocolate cake and dip into the huge bowl of godis that was put out (and I blame these very same godis and all their little cousins for the fact that S. commented that I seemed to have, ahem, gained a little weight in the general stomach area. I guess I need to get my sad ass to the gym).

Apparently, after I fell asleep, there ensued a huge argument about Israel, complete with namecalling (''you zionist, you'') and threats of making people read Noam Chomsky, all carried on in unfriendly tones and breaking all Swedish etiquette rules that forbid the discussion of politics (I blame this rule for my utter lack of comprehension when it comes to Swedish politics and the seven political parties represented in the Riksdag).

When I woke up, those damned wool trousers I was wearing making me feel extremely itchy and hot, A. said ''Did the shouting wake you up?'' She was very amused when I said no, it was, er, those damned wool trousers.

- by Francis S.

It's time for another lesson in Swedish culture. The subject is food (inspired by yami, proprieter of green/gabbro, a blog that is some kind of fifth cousin twice removed to this one). Sweets, to be precise.

2. Goodies. Swedes have an endearingly childish love of candy. Having a sweet tooth myself, I find this a very attractive trait. The word for candy is godis and it is pronounced just like the word goodies except that the final -s- really does sound like a soft, unvoiced -s- and not like the harder, voiced -z- sound (i.e. in English, it sounds like goodeze, but in Swedish it sounds like go-diece). There are candy stores all over the place and in fact, two of them within a half block of my apartment, including one that has been there since the husband was a little boy. These candy stores have bins of candy of many different types, sometimes a hundred or more, and everyone helps themselves using large plastic spoons, pouring the candy into paper bags which are then weighed at the checkout. (You can also find these candy bins at seven-eleven, at the grocery store, the movie theater, the video rental store, and I'm sure other places I'm forgetting). It's a common sight to see adults walking around with yellow-and-red-clown-patterned or pink-and-white-striped bags of candy.

The candy falls into several categories.

There's chocolate, of course, although most of that is not of a very good quality. My favorite chocolates are in fact the Finnish chocolates made by Fazer - little bite-sized pieces wrapped in paper; Geisha is the best, it has a hazelnut cream filling.

There are also a lot of wine gum/ gummi bear/ gumdrop types of candy. They come in all the usual flavors such as lemon and orange, as well as favorite Swedish flavors such as pear. They are shaped like a child's pacifier, or pieces of fruit, or frogs, or simply little discs or lozenges.

My favorites are the sours. Most of these are a variety of the wine gum/ gummi bear/ gumdrop type, and they are shaped like fish, or soda bottles, or keys. They also have sour chestnuts, which are fruit- flavored hard- on- the- outside- soft- on-t he- inside lozenges, sort of a cross between an overgrown skittle and a sourball.

Then there is the licorice. There is sweet licorice - most notable are the licorice rats - and there is salt licorice.

Since I first arrived in Sweden and tried turkisk pebar, I've wondered who first decided that this was a palatable combination, and how did they in fact convince a whole nation that salt (and not just regular salt, I think I could handle regular salt, this seems to have some horrible ammoniac quality to it) and licorice go together like, uh, the pope and a shit in the woods. Or something like that.

So, the final point of this lesson is, unless you know what you are doing, do not be convinced by some laughing Swede to sample any candy that looks suspicious (i.e. nasty little hard greyish-brown dusty disks, grey nubbly gum-droppy things, grey discs with a salty peace sign on them, you get the picture).

- by Francis S.

When I was in Greece, I was reading Down There on a Visit by Christopher Isherwood. He's an excellent memoirist, most of the books of his that I've read are very autobiographical, and he's written much about Berlin in the early thirties. But as I read this book, lying on a beach next to the husband and who knows how many others reading their own books or sleeping or talking, I thought to myself how the world today is so much a smaller place, people are so much closer together that the kind of war - and build up to it - that he writes about wouldn't happen now. I thought how different those times were, and wondered if he lived with a sense of foreboding as to what might happen, and thought how I live absolutely in a time where I have no sense of foreboding about anything other than the next week's work, that life these days is so sure. And now, of course, the surety is gone, at least in part. Just how much, that is the question.

The Swedish word for the day is kriget. It means the war.

- by Francis S.

I've started a novel here. It has no real title yet.

- by Francis S.

It's kind of heartening to read that at least some people in the States seem to be more than just ambivalent about starting a war, of bombing Afghanistan or any other country, that people are so skeptical about anything so brashly called ''operation infinite justice.''

It would be hard to tell that this is true, reading the news or watching it on television here, be it Swedish television or CNN, listening to George Bush. It's so hard to guage from here, when I really talk only with my parents (who seem to move further and further left with age; they are decidedly more active on the whole gay-rights issue than I am, for instance. To think that my father voted for Barry Goldwater in the 60s. Jesus...), siblings and friends, all so decidedly dovish.

The Swedish word for the day is överhuvudtaget, which literally translated means something like a grab of the head, but is an idiom that would mean on the whole.

- by Francis S.

You'd think that being a model in Paris for Christian Dior would be, well, fun. Living in the city of light just off the Champs Elyseé. Travelling to all kinds of great places like the Seychelles, Buenos Aires, Capetown, Bali. Being able to wear anything and look like it was made for you (because, in fact, it was). Having stalkers send you CDs they've made themselves, CDs filled with songs about how great you are: "A.'s so beautiful, I wish she were mine. Mine, mine, mine, mine, all miiiiiiiiinnnnnnneeeeee..."

Uh, stalkers aside, it's hard to convince me, no matter how hard I imagine the long days of photo shoots, the dieting, the pressure to look beautiful, that this is not some kind of ideal life.

Then again, A. is really sick of it. And at last, it looks like she's going to be able to move back to Sweden permanently. It looks like she's got a job working in television production and she is ecstatic. She certainly deserves all of it, no matter how beautiful or smart she is. After all, I love her - not like I love the husband, but she's been a great friend ever since the day I met her, when I first visited Stockholm.

(They're not going to give up the apartment in Paris, thank god.)

The Swedish word for the day is äntligen. It means finally.

- by Francis S.

What makes all university towns seem somehow alike?

I just got back from a night and a day at a meeting in a village outside of Lund, in Skåne, the southernmost province of Sweden where the dialect is particularly strong and, to me at least, difficult to understand (it sounds gargly in a very Danish way, not surprising considering Skåne was part of Denmark for centuries). Lund is where Sweden's second university is situated (Uppsala, just north of Stockholm and founded in 1477, is first).

And while it has an interesting and old cathedral (built on top of an old pagan temple), and the charming half-timbered and brick buildings characteristic of southern Sweden, it is the intense feeling of being a university town that strikes me most.

Is it that youth of a certain age (at least in the west) confer a certain energy to the air? I suppose it's more likely that the place just dredges up memories of my own college days, the liberating feeling of first independence, of smoking cigarettes and drinking endless cups of coffee, of having a crush on life and all its possibilities, the feelings of intense love and intense loathing that anything and everything inspires.

Cheap nostalgia, no doubt, is at the bottom of all of this.

The Swedish word for the day is längtan. It means longing.

- by Francis S.

Those wacky CIA operatives! What will they do next? (Credit goes to David, one of the editors working for me who showed me the article in the Guardian by Julian Borger from which this excerpt is taken).

In another snapshot of folly offered by the new files, a memo dated 1967 on "Views of Trained Cats" looks into the possibility of surgically inserting microphones and transmitters into cats and using them as walking bugs. The operation was codenamed "Acoustic Kitty" and was a resounding failure. Having wired their first trained cat for sound, they released it near a park with strict orders to eavesdrop on two men on a bench, but the poor animal was run over by a taxi before it had taken more than a few steps towards its target. The CIA researchers came to the conclusion that they could train cats to move short distances, but that "the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that for our (intelligence) purposes, it would not be practical."

Oh, yes. The Central ''Intelligence'' Agency is always on the cutting edge of, uh, intelligence. (The full article is here.)

The Swedish word for the day is märklig. It means funny peculiar (not funny ha ha).

- by Francis S.

My parents are good farm stock, raised in the Iowa countryside. Thank god, they got out before we, my brothers and sister, were born. When we were children and took the car trip from Chicago to my grandparents' homes in Sully and Pella, we used to refer to it as a visit to the planet Iowa.

Of course, it's charming if you're not from there and related to no one from there.

If you are, well, too bad for you. Everyone knows everything about everyone else, like for instance that you weren't in church on Sunday, or maybe that you went to the ''liberal'' (yeah, maybe liberal in comparison to Attila the Hun) Fourth Reformed Church instead of the all-powerful and always-packed-to-the-gills Second Christian Reformed church where you're supposed to go.

My sister recently pointed out to me that Gourmet magazine has discovered the subtleties of Iowa cooking, something I never really grew to appreciate much: my grandmother's secret-recipe grape juice - add grape kool-aid and sugar to give the grandkids a real kick; the stack of plain white wonder bread served with every meal; tough little porkchops that, with a simple shoelace and a little gumption, could easily be converted into nunchuks. Although to be fair, my grandmother did make a mean coconut cream pie.

A recent article lead off with a story on the Coffee Cup Cafe, a place where my grandmother who didn't make coconut cream pie worked after my grandparents had retired and moved into town (Sully, Home of the White Marigold, pop. 331 at that time, now it's grown to something like 900), and after my grandfather died.

You can also read about the Olde Town Eatery in Pella, a restaurant I must admit I've never heard of in all my visits there, (I guess they forgot to add the -e- that's supposed to go on the end of -town)-.

The Swedish phrase for the day is dålig mage. It means weak stomach.

- by Francis S.

I guess I better mention Athens and the wedding, before I forget the small details, such as the two men - handsome, sunbaked, lean as cats, matching grey trousers several sizes too large for them, a sad craziness about them, looking for all the world like some double Greek version of Hazel Motes without the intensity - walking back and forth and playing accordians on the median on one of the main roads leading out of Athens. Or the startling newness of Athens - most buildings look to have been built in the 60s or 70s - as dirty and choked with traffic as I'd been told, a sort of European version of Bangkok.

As usual when traveling with Swedes, it was important to find the watering holes of the beautiful people and then stay out, night after night, drinking too much and laughing and dancing until dawn, then sleeping late and getting up just in time to go to the beach/go shopping/eat a very late lunch/have a drink for a few hours.

So we went to these clubs in Piraeus (''all the good clubs are in Piraeus'') on the sea, everything was white, white, white, including the clothes of all the beautiful people inside (except us, we tended toward fashionista black). And in the day we went to the beach (Scinia)/went shopping/ate a very late lunch/had a drink for a few hours, depending on the day, followed by going back to our various hotels and apartments to nap and bathe and dress and preen in preparation for another evening.

The day at last arrived for the wedding, which was held in a new Greek Orthodox church up in the hills somewhere. The service itself was barely understandable, being in (probably old) Greek, a mix of chanting and recitation involving three priests, the bride and groom, a best man (who was, er, a woman) and a second witness, along with the two families and various still and video cameramen, including press who were there because the groom is a well-known sportscaster in a country where sports is the No. 1 topic of conversation among males (followed by politics, family and sex, so it was said).

We had been warned to stand throughout the service, but after about five minutes we noticed that most of the Greeks had taken their seats, so we followed suit, although there were intervals in which everyone stood. But mostly, they sat and kept up a non-stop chatter that rather shocked the Swedes, who found it a bit disrespectful. (We were told later that in fact the chatter had been less than usual, in fact normally the priests have to shush the congregation several times throughout any given wedding. The bride said people talk because they're bored, but someone sitting at our table at the reception said that in fact it is a very deliberate sign of disrespect, or rather an assertion that the very powerful Greek Orthodox Church is not going to run their lives).

At about three-quarters of the way through, 13-year-old girls walked slowly past the pews, passing around baskets filled with rice for everyone to take a handful. A short time later, after the best woman passed over the heads of the bride and groom two diadems tied together by a ribbon, everyone stood up and threw their rice as hard as they could at the bridal couple. The service seemed to continue, but the Greeks lost interest after this and the chatter grew to a low roar and everyone started making their way to the back of the church until finally, some five to ten minutes later, the service was finished and the bride and groom walked out.

The reception itself was on another hill somewhere not too far away, at the Jockey Club, with some 200 Greeks and 25 Swedes (or pseudo Swedes such as myself) eating dinner and making constant speeches.

The bane of any Swedish wedding or birthday is the long list of mostly formal speeches which usually take up a good hour and a half's worth of time, of which nearly a full hour is actual speech. And you're not supposed to eat while someone is speaking - it always seems as if you've just managed to spear a small potato on your fork but before you can get it up to your mouth, another long and tedious speech has begun, starting with the details of a rarely humorous childhood incident and ending with a toast, all of it in careful doggerel. Which means it's rare to actually eat a hot meal at such an event in Sweden.

The toastmaster (another important feature of formal Swedish parties), poor man, was in rather a difficult position because the Greeks had a dual reaction as the speeches went on and on - some began to leave while at the same time others, realizing what this whole speech thing was about, were determined not to be outdone by the Swedes and all of a sudden wanted to make their own spontaneous speeches, which is a breach of Swedish etiquette: all speeches must be made via a request made to the toastmaster before the wedding.

Then the Swedes pulled out a couple of Swedish flags and got up (me included) and sang the Swedish national anthem, ''Du Gamla, Du Fria.''

It's odd, Swedes and their flag. Hanging a flag in your window in Sweden is a sign of nationalism to most, and just about everyone I know finds it more than distasteful. But this is the second time I've seen the Swedish flag hauled out at a foreign wedding like this. (Is it the same in the U.S.? I have such ambivalent feelings about the U.S. flag as well. Well, maybe not so ambivalent. The fight about the flag-burning amendment - an amendment which would, in effect, take away people's right to show respect for the flag because it would be illegal to show disrespect to it - has turned it into an unfit symbol of what I think is worth being patriotic about the U.S.)

The national-anthem singing was not my favorite part of the wedding, it felt quite odd to me. And, of course, afterwards the Greeks had to sing their national anthem. It felt a bit tense to me, especially with one of the best friends of the bride complaining loudly about how most of the speeches from the Greeks were in Greek and not English, the language the Swedes had chosen as a lingua franca. When she got up to make her speech, which was to be the final speech of the evening, I found to my great relief that rather than a speech, she made the bride and groom play a game wherein they were blindfolded and had to choose which was their spouse among various legs and/or noses presented to them. All of this to the great amusement of the Greeks.

At long last, the dancing began - including a period where the bride and groom danced rather suggestively on top of a table during which the groom's friends tried unsuccessfully to rip his shirt off - and lasted nearly until dawn, at about which time the Swedes were quite drunk and the father of the groom, perhaps drunk himself, threw a glass onto the dancefloor, smashing the glass into a thousand pieces in celebration (his two young nephews, gleefully following their uncle's example, threw their glasses as well). And the Swedes (and the few Greeks left) continued to dance on top of the shards of glass, laughing, the long skirt of the dress of the bride ruined by the dirt and glass.

- by Francis S.

Good god, I'm glad I'm not in America. Not because Americans seem to be a greater target for, uh, terrorists than do Swedes. At least at the moment. (Not that Sweden hasn't had its moments, such as the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme).

No, I'm glad that I'm not there to have to look for the voices of reason amongst the overwhelming nationalistic bombast and bellicose rhetoric that is surely inescapable throughout all fifty states, in every city, in every suburb, in every small town and country village. I think I would probably be dead from a stroke on account of my blood pressure going through the roof. It's exhausting enough being here and reading about it or watching it on Swedish television.

Thinking back, I'm awfully glad that when the attack happened, the hotel in Mykonos we were at had BBC World and notCNN. Moments ago, the husband had left the t.v. here on CNN and I overheard voices calling in from New Jersey or Texas or Alabama or somewhere and I realized I couldn't stand to hear what these people might be saying.

The thing is, I greatly fear that people here are misunderstanding what I assume the U.S. leaders are thinking, not to mention the public.

Last night at dinner, the television producer, M., stayed until the wee hours after a vaguely unsettling meal with him and the priest and her sister - their father is in Uzbekistan for the next couple of weeks, refuses to come home and the family is, well, nervous, Uzbekistan being one of those countries immediately adjacent to Afghanistan - as well as the priest's boyfriend, the policeman, who is on call this weekend to protect embassies or the mosque or what have you. We talked mostly about this mess, things such as Sweden's observing a minute of silence on Friday - people had some mixed feelings about this, mostly that many, many more minutes of silence should be observed for events that are far more cataclysmic in terms of death than the recent U.S. attacks and that the motivation for it was as much economic as it was about it being some sort of attack on the so-called ''democratic way of life.'' We talked about what this war on terrorism might or should mean in places like Northern Ireland, Spain and the Basque country, Chechnya, whether these things then will possibly be resolved and by what means and by whom. Then the priest said that she thought the appropriate punishment for Osama bin Laden would be to force him to be a permanent fixture at Disney World for the rest of his life.

After everyone had left and the husband had gone to bed, M. sat and he drank his white tequila while I smoked cigarettes, and he told me that the positive thing about all this is that this has made the U.S. see that it is part of the rest of the world, that things like the Kyoto Treaty are small potatoes and the U.S. wouldn't be so petty any more about signing such a thing. He was, as he said, ultimately optimistic.

Me, I am ultimately pessimistic on this point. I cannot remember reading anything or hearing anything about the U.S. being part of the rest of the world - in the way M. means - from the parade of politicians, former politicians, security or Middle East or disaster relief analysts who have spoken or written words over the past five days. I may be mistaken, I hope I am terribly mistaken, but it seems to me that the U.S. doesn't really have any concept that the rest of the world wants this. That they want the U.S. to stop being a bully who runs away and won't play if he can't get his way. They want the U.S. to be a co-leader working hand-in-hand with its allies, and that here in Sweden at least, most people seem to want this group to function as policemen of sorts but only in so far as this means working to ensure people around the world everywhere are allowed to live their lives without fear and with fairness and justice. (Not that there aren't people here in Sweden physically attacking Muslims just as in the U.S. - the government does have an armed guard posted outside the mosque here in Stockholm. Despite this, the general sentiments seem to be as I said a sentence ago.)

My fear is that Western Europe has just said it will stand by the U.S. come hell or high water and the U.S. leadership can only take this as carte blanche to do whatever it decides is best, and current leadership is, well, not one that I really trust to do the proper thing, to act in what I think are the best interests of the world, but rather to work in the best interests of the Republican Party (I couldn't stand to watch Congress ''spontaneously'' singing the Republican National Anthem, ''God Bless America.'' On a nearly completely different tangent, for some strange reason the only time I cried was when I heard the guards outside Buckingham Palace playing the ''Star Spangled Banner,'' although perhaps that's not so strange, given that I'm living outside the U.S. so it's perhaps closer to my life somehow).

I hope I am very wrong on this, either on what the best interests of the Republican Party are (after all, Rudy Guiliani was quite amazing during all of this, surely people have already begun talking about a brilliant political future for him, code words for presidential material) or on how this will be handled by all these leaders who happen to be republicans. The president himself just seems in a daze, wondering why he ever ran for president and if there's any way he can take it back. Poor man. Poor in most senses of that word except in its meaning of lacking lucre.

I think those in the U.S. don't understand, when a taxi driver in Athens tells me that he thinks this is a CIA plot, that what this at heart means is that people in a lot of places outside of Palestine or Iraq just do not trust the United States.

And frankly, I don't blame them. I sure as hell don't trust the CIA either. Not of course that I believe this would ever be committed by them. I just don't trust them.

The Swedish word for the day is rädd. It means afraid. Strangely enough, the verb rädda means to save.

- by Francis S.

We're back, tanned but exhausted and dazed, overdosed on the bad news. And I seem to have lost all sense of proportion and place. Everything feels too emphatic or too subtle, the colors a shade or two off.

I'm not altogether sure that trading the blue and white and dust-colored summery dry islands of the Aegean for the grey and green autumn-sodden islands of the Baltic will make it seem any less that people are going about their daily business a little too tidily, given the circumstances.

It was so strange, eating dinner rather mechanically in a taverna on the beach on Wednesday evening, surrounded by Europe enjoying itself - Germans and French and English and Greeks - and me feeling as if everyone else is ignoring the uneasy feeling they surely must have in their stomachs. Then feeling as if I'm just being melodramatic, feeding into all the hyperbole I've been hearing all day. Then making mental notes for a magazine review of the taverna. Then chastising myself for making the mental notes, then chastising myself all over again for being melodramatic. Stupid, that.

And now we're back, and I still don't know what to think, or even how to sort out all my strange emotions about these airplanes, these hijackers, this rubble, these dead people, these politicians, this teetering economy, these countries whose citizens have an intense distrust and hatred of the United States.

- by Francis S.

Fifteen-hour work days can really do a guy in. I hate how it seems to take two-days worth of work in one day to actually go on vacation in order to not set yourself up for disaster on your return.

Off to Greece, and not nearly soon enough. (It's Mykonos after the wedding in Athens. Apparently that's where some of the husband's friends are going to hang out. O, the glamor.)

We'll be back in 10 days.

The Swedish word for the day is jättetrött. It means tired as all get out. - by Francis S.

Well, we're soon off on yet another jaunt. This time to Greece, for the fourth wedding of the year. (This is why everyone should live in Europe, because you can just jaunt off like that on account of it's inexpensive to fly, you have six weeks of vacation, and it doesn't take too long to get there.)

It's funny, all these marriages all of a sudden. First it was the editor marrying his voluptuous girlfriend, now wife, in the south in Ramlösa, the place where they get the water that comes in the light blue glass bottle. A relatively small celebration, but choice.

Then it was the wedding out in the country somewhere, and we were supposed to dress formally but we didn't although I did wear a dark blue frilly tuxedo shirt made out of some kind of synthetic fabric or other. And we hung out with our friend the priest, who married us and was now marrying this other couple. She left right after the dinner, after smoking a pack or so of cigarettes with us. And then the husband's ex was there all the way from Shanghai, with his American boyfriend (strange coincidence, that). And we all got really plastered.

Then it was the wedding in the mosque where I couldn't get comfortable, sitting cross-legged on the carpet. I guess I'm getting too old. And the bride had to have her hair and arms covered despite the fact that her dress had huge see-through panels in it and the cloth she used to cover her arms and legs was completely sheer. She actually looked pretty damned fabulous. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the women covered themselves with these white scarves that are, to be generous, unflattering. That is, unless you want to look like someone poking their head painfully through a tent flap. Or maybe more like one of those people in old photographs sticking their heads through a cardboard painting of a crescent moon to become the face of the man- (or more likely woman, in this case) in- the- moon.

So now, time for the wedding in Athens that ought to be quite the thing. We leave on Wednesday morning. It will be too many people no doubt, but a reunion of sorts among the group that made the trek to the wedding in Malaysia of the friends from London - the Wallpaper editor and her husband the photographer. And then afterwards we'll go by ourselves off to one or another of the islands for some chalky- white- village- perched- above- the- water- and- maybe- a- beach time alone. Oh, yes.

And it's two-for-one day today, with a second Swedish word of the day: bröllopet. It means the wedding.

- by Francis S.

I was trying to find a picture of a dog harness on the net just like the one I keep seeing on this pug-type critter that is always out being walked when I'm on my way to work, or today, on my way home. The harness has a sort of handle on it, so you can pick the pug up and use it as a kind of hairy featherduster, for instance. Or maybe you could put things in its mouth and use it as a purse.

The thing is, I couldn't find any pictures at all. But I did run across plenty of interesting philosophical questions, such as ''Is the prong collar an instrument of torture or a universal trainingdevice?'' and interesting facts such as that while the Gun Dog Supply Company still sells collar replacements for the ''bark eliminator,'' the ''bark eliminator'' is no longer available. However, you can still purchase the ''bark limiter.'' The copy doesn't really spell out what exactly the ''bark limiter'' does, except to note that the ''low level'extended momentary' stimulation eliminates unwanted barking'' and that the ''small, inconspicious collar fits dogs of all sizes except toy/miniature breeds.''

Which makes me very curious about what ''extended momentary'' could possibly mean, not to mention ''low level [sic] stimulation.''

The Swedish word for the day is aj!. It means ouch. - by Francis S.

Hmmm. It sounds like, according to the New York Times, one of my most-trusted authorities when it comes to all the news that's fit to print*, the figures for the percentage of the population that identifies itself as homosexual in the U.S. - 2.8 percent for men, 1.4 percent for women - are significantly lower than the numbers bandied about by all our favorite gay rights organizations. I suppose the old Kinsey figures are pretty suspect. And I think those gay rights organizations would have a bit more credibility by using better numbers, maybe less political and social clout, maybe not, but at least more credibility.

The question is, why do nearly twice as many men identify themselves as gay as women identify themselves as lesbian? Odd, that. Seems to point to a fairly profound difference in male and female sexuality, regardless of the orientation. - by Francis S.

*One of the few complaints I have about the NYT is that they have no sense of humor. None. My ex once helped a friend write a letter to the editor suggesting the Olympics™ revert back to the practice of athletes competing buck naked. The whole purpose of the letter was to include a pun on the newspaper's slogan - the punchline of the letter was ''all the nudes fit to sprint.'' So they printed the letter - which was a feat in and of itself, not an easy thing to achieve - but without the punchline, for chrissakes. Talk about stuffy and self-important.

And yet, despite the pole- up- the- ass routine, the NYT is tops, I gotta admit there's no doubt about that.

Last night we had dinner with H., the husband's aunt of sorts - she's known him since he was 10 or so. It was a farewell dinner for her daughter, who's moving to Manhattan to work for the Swedish delegation to the U.N. in New York.

At the dinner was Sweden's version of Barbara Walters. Well, she's maybe a bit more sophisticated than old Barbara, but she does interview all kinds of bigwig types, from the maudlin - Elton John - to the vilified - Qaddafi. And, while I could follow the conversation, mostly, and throw in a few comments here and there, and answer questions put to me - ''Är dina fördäldrar religiösa?''* - still I was unable to take full advantage of the situation, what with my fumbling Swedish.

I couldn't ask the Swedish Barbara Walters about, well, I don't know, what is it like interviewing all these people, for instance. Who is most interesting? Who is a boor and who is a bore? Is it hard to maintain some semblance of subjectivity all the time? Who has infuriated or disgusted you? Who has charmed you against your will?

I suppose even if I could ask them, I still would have felt as if I was imposing, asking such questions. Swedes hate to appear nosey, it's very bad form. Plus, the Swedish Barbara Walters is a reporter after all, and most reporters get really uncomfortable when someone else starts asking the questions.

Still, she talked some about herself - happy months spent in Cuba and Colombia studying Spanish where she didn't really learn a thing but loved the people, for instance, or that Leonard Cohen was very intelligent and charming when she interviewed him. Yet she was curiously unassuming but with a certain commanding presence.

In short, I liked her considerably.

These dinners with H. used to be my sole real practice in speaking Swedish because H. is my only friend here who doesn't really speak English, it was no doubt difficult enough for her to learn Swedish when she moved here 20 years ago from Chile. And she understands English reasonably well, she just doesn't quite speak it.

When I first met her, we spoke Spanish but somehow despite my clumsy grammar and lack of vocabulary, we soon switched to a peculiar mix of Swedish and Spanish, and then to Swedish alone as I've gotten to the point where while I can still understand quite a bit of Spanish but if I try to speak it, that pathetically inept part of my brain responsible for languages other than English will only allow Swedish out of my mouth.

Anyway, the dinners used to consist of my speaking English to everyone but H., and everyone speaking English to me. Then sometime over the past six months I finally made the switch over to speaking Swedish with everyone. And if I'm hopped up on enough red wine, I can get pretty chatty.

Last night was not one of those nights, however. - by Francis S.

* ''Are your parents religious?''

It's time for me to answer (for myself) the question: what the hell is this about, or rather, why am I writing this, why does anyone write these online diaries, why would anyone read them or want to read them, why do we (me and the other people who write these things) have such exhibitionist tendencies?

At the beginning, I told myself that I was writing this to keep a record of my painful struggle to learn Swedish, that I would be motivated to keep it up if I did it so publicly and with the attendant rewards of being read by people I don't even know. How that is supposed to be a reward, well, I guess anyone reading this would understand.

Anyway, I started this with a modicum of self-doubt. How could I be interesting without revealing too much? It seemed to me that the most interesting stuff to read is the most personal, provided it's not too pathetic, too repetitive, too banal. Plus, the husband is way too connected to the people who fill the gossip rags of Sweden for me to be too forthright, at least about a some things. I keep worrying that for the right person this could be a sort of journal á clef, so I don't put anything particularly juicy or maybe even interesting about anyone in here.

So, I thought briefly about writing the whole thing in the third person, but decided that was just not in the spirit of a journal. So I picked a tone, and dove in, knowing next to nothing about the psycho-sociological philosophical semiotics of this blogger stuff.

But now as I stumble about, I happened on a page from this guy who used to shepherd something called the Metalog Ratings at Beebo.org!, both apparently now defunct. And he wrote:

I lost interest in weblogs. They were never a great passion; over the last year or so they've become much less interesting, and much more, well, precious. Make me care about you and your weblog; don't assume that I do. Junk the "mystery" links, the cutesy lines, the breakfast, lunch and dinner menus.

And I realized, Jesus, I've been writing breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. I've been, well, maybe not precious exactly but definitely a tad on the arch side. Cutesy lines? I'm not sure exactly what he means by cutesy.

The only trap I seemed not to have fallen into is peppering my posts with mystery links. Well, maybe just accidentally touched it with my big toe without actually falling all the way into the trap.

Which brings me to the question, why would anyone want to read this? I honestly don't know. I don't know if I would read this. And, while I know I would like to have people read it, on some level it doesn't matter. So, maybe I can just skip to the next question.

Which is: why am I such an exhibitionist? I guess it's an American thing. Andy Warhol and the whole ''15 minutes of fame concept,'' which the Internet seems to have changed into ''famous to 15 people who would normally not know you.''

The Swedish word for the day is kändisar. It means famous people. - by Francis S.

Those Mufti people of Aden sure knew a good thing when they tasted it: ah, coffee. ''I love coffee, I love tea, I love the java jive and it loves me...''

Now, if only we weren't out of espresso, I could've just whipped up a cup in the machine in no time instead of having to empty the dishwasher in order to get the dirty dishes in the sink out of the way so I could actually get proper access to the water tap, water being an essential ingredient of coffee. But it was a good thing I did the dishes, it being takeout Indian food last night from Indira, the McDonald's of our block (Farmer Street), takeout because we're a couple of lazy slobs.

Er, I'm a lazy slob, the husband is just lazy. Well, actually he isn't, he worked one of those nasty 13-hour days yesterday, starting at 7:30 a.m. (And he's working again this morning. Ah, the painful life of being an arbiter of fashion). Me, I just didn't feel like cooking because, well, I didn't feel like cooking.

The thing about Indira food is that, like McDonald's, it has a rather insistent stink about it that is extraordinarily appealing as you remove the chicken pista korma and chicken butter masala and naan bread from the various containers and paper bags and heap it all on your plate. But once eaten, that stink loses its glamor. And especially if you consumed a bottle of really good 1995 Chateauneuf du Pape over the course of the evening as well, the combined odors of oil and stale wine the next morning are not pretty.

All of which is to reiterate that it was a noble thing doing those dishes. - by Francis S.

When I read that this guy, Jonno, was doing a survey on whether guys dress left or right (I'm a left-dresser myself), I was extremely entertained and naturally responded immediately. I don't know him, but I should give him credit for inspiring me to start this whole thing up a few weeks ago.

Anyway, all I want now is to see the results of the survey, and see if some scientist could come up with an explanation. I highly recommend my one or two readers to respond to ensure a broad sampling. >- by Francis S.

I realize I've been derelict in the whole Swedish bit and decided to mend my ways with a handy cultural lesson for all the millions of people who are surely interested in how exactly one lives in Sweden.

1. Lines, queues, knowing your place. Don't be disturbed if, as you trot merrily up the sidewalk smiling stupidly and minding your own business, you actually are butted in the shoulder by a person. Or maybe 10 people. And then not a one of them says a word, or even turns around, leaving you wondering why everyone is picking on you, and since when did you become such a pariah, and finally, how can you get back at them?

Two things are going on here.

First, for some strange reason, there's a lot of confusion about personal space. That's why Swedes always, always use the take-a-number system (Swedish word for the day: nummerlapp. It means the piece of paper with a number on it that you take at every ticket booth, meat counter, bank, tax office... you get the picture.) because then you don't have to actually stand in a line where you might accidentally touch someone because you have no sense of personal space. Or maybe they have no sense of personal space because they never have to stand in line. Who knows.

Alternatively, it's been explained to me that the switch from British-style left-side-of-the-road driving to American right-side-of-the-road driving in the late '60s (it was literally done in a day, apparently with no major mishaps) combined with a subway system with trains that don't consistently stick to one side or the other of a station from one subway station to the next, produce chaos when any single person is trying to decide where to walk on the sidewalk.

What is ironic is that it is very important in Swedish culture to, er, know your place, and that place is exactly the same as everyone else, in other words, don't think too highly of yourself - there's nothing worse than thinking you're better, or being better for that matter. Jämnt is the concept. Which I mostly like, Swedes are wonderfully egalitarian, maddeningly egalitarian and consensus-driven - everyone needs to come to a consensus on what they want/should/need to do as a people/company/family, for example. Swedes themselves seem to bemoan the fact that they are like this, and yet they're proud of it.

The second thing, the fact that no one apologizes, is something else altogether, I've decided. It's actually not rudeness, but a certain shyness and concern not to cause trouble. At least that's my generous take on it. By saying ''excuse me,'' you are causing even more of an imposition because the person you have accidentally butted on the shoulder then has to pause and respond. At least that's why I think people do it. Some Swedes have explained to me it's because Swedish culture is crude and boorish, but I like to think I'm right (who doesn't?).

- by Francis S. (who actually loves Sweden dearly.)

I bought a copy of Myra Breckinridge to take back with me, and I read it on the airplane, or at least most of it. I bought it because I saw it on as a forgotten classic on some list or other. I haven't read all that much Gore Vidal, but I did like Lincoln and his memoir, Palimpsest was sufficiently full of homosexualist gossip, as the man himself would say. I can't say I'd ever want to meet him - after all, what person in their right mind would divide their time between homes in those oddly parallel cities, Los Angeles and Rome (Kenneth Anger should have called his book Hollywood Roma, a much better metaphor than Babylon if we're talking ancient decadence).

I didn't much care for the perfumey prose, it's a little too precious for me, regardless of how much it mirrors the narrator's character. But I was constantly struck by the modern themes and obsessions of the book - copyright 1968 - what with the eponymous transsexual Miss Breckinridge, the worship of forties-era movies (which would be the equivalent of worshipping movies today such as, well, ''Kramer vs. Kramer''), the pansexuality of Miss Breckinridge's students at the Academy of Drama and Modeling (where she teaches Empathy and Posture), the appearance of the Chateau Marmont Hotel. I suppose it all fits into Susan Sontag's definition of ''low camp'' (or is that high camp? I can't remember whether self-aware camp is high or low...) which was itself published in the mid-60s.

The Swedish word for the day is busunge. It means naughty little boy. - by Francis S.

Going back to the fatherland is always a jolt.

The first thing I notice back in the old U.S. of A. is that everyone can understand what everyone else is saying. Which, of course, is true here in Sweden for just about everybody but me. Still, I can't help thinking to myself as I sit in a restaurant serving Sri Lankan food in Minneapolis with the husband, my sister and her family: ''Do these people at the next table realize that I can understand every single word they are saying?!?'' And, ''Aren't they, shouldn't they be deeply ashamed to be talking about their emergency gastro-intestinal surgery like that?'' - by Francis S.

My favorite part of the trip was going to the Minnesota State Fair. I thought the husband would be fascinated by the American hyperbole of it. You know, the fattest sow, the biggest pumpkin, the tastiest milkshake. Unfortunately it was too much for him. He was in shock, the poor guy. It could have been the 175,000 Minnesotans crammed into the fairgrounds. Or the corndogs, the scotch-eggs-on-a-stick, or the deep-fried candy bars (it's true!). Or maybe it was the fashion show sheep competition (4H teens in the sweltering heat, dressed in wool jumpers, blazers, top hats - you name it - leading newly shorn and bleating sheep wearing ribbons and collars and bowties to match the jumpers, blazers and top hats, parading stolidly or with embarrassment around the straw-filled and manure-strewn catwalk to the eager and earnest sound of the announcer saying, ''...the 100-percent merino wool skirt Shawna is wearing is made from the Gustafsson family's favorite ram, Stiffy, and has been hand-dyed to copy an authentic Navaho pattern from a vase Shawna's Aunt Lena got at South of the Border on her way down to Daytona for a well-earned vacation after she divorced her second husband, Ollie.''

My husband did perk up when we got to the dairy pavilion and saw the butter sculptures of Princess Kay of the Milky Way and the 11 runners up in the Princess Kay of the Milky Way contest. You can actually watch the sculptor in her revolving refrigerated glass cylinder as she attacks a 90-pound slab of butter, over the 10 days of the fair carving life-sized busts of Princess Kay and the runners up. The Princess and runners up each get to keep their sculptures when the fair is over!

The Swedish phrase for the day is: hem ljuva hem. It means home, sweet home. - by Francis S.

Gee, but it's great to be back home. Home is where I wanna be-eeeeeee.

Everything is fresh and clean and new again, coming back. Checking out the windows in Bo!, the Swedish modern antique store on Östgötagatan (was that black stroller in the window really supposed to be there? And is it really true that furniture younger than I am could be considered, er, antique?) and the tree that must have fallen or been pulled down in Mosebacketorg, outside the Södrateatern and the beer garden: Things actually change. Even in just 10 days. - by Francis S.

Off to the new world in no time flat. But first, there is the laundry, the clean-up, dinner, dishes, the packing.

The Swedish word for the day is semester. It means vacation. - by Francis S.

Whew. The husband just called to say that dinner is cancelled. But now I don't get to go off on a delectable memoirish food reverie, á la Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher or Alice B. Toklas - her cookbook, famous for her recipe for hashish fudge, is actually a great read - as if I could match either of them in prose. I was on a Moroccan-Spanish kick and going to fix those merguëz sausages wrapped in pastry, couscous salad (which is recreated by taste from salad our downstairs neighbor gave us when she moved in - she's half-Moroccan and a great cook to judge by her salad, and she did win some big Swedish cooking award a couple years ago) and gazpacho as close as possible to the gazpacho the husband was served by his mother when he was a boy.

I love to cook and to eat. And I have the extra five kilos to show it.

The Swedish phrase of the day: för mycket. It means too much. - by Francis S.

Why does it take so much work to go away from work for a week? Suddenly photographers fail to deliver, an editorial has to be replaced at the last minute, and someone else has to check out the last pageproofs because of course they're arriving when I'm gone. All of which pales in comparison to the husband's 15-hour day yesterday. But I guess he decided that that wasn't enough, so he invited our priest and her boyfriend the policeman over for dinner tomorrow night. Of course the husband has to work late, so I'll have to do laundry and fix dinner, but we'll squeeze it all in because we love them. But still, I can't help asking why I do this to myself because I know I'll be frantic tomorrow, rushing around like mad in the kitchen and swearing in Swedish, ''fan också'' which means something like dammit, too! - by Francis S.

Surprise, surprise. The friends from London are in town.

We went to their wedding two years ago in Malaysia, a wedding which requires an essay unto itself to properly capture the peculiar post-colonial palm-treed and sky-scrapered not-quite-Singapore essence of it all. The aunties, real-life versions of 30s actresses, madcap and impossibly elegant. The Royal Selangor Golf Club. St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral (which is, in fact, smaller than, say, the First Christian Reformed Church in Sully, Iowa, pop. 322) with its uneven stone floors paved over the tropical earth, its Indian priest and its ancient organist playing ''Jerusalem'' in rather ragged fashion, not to mention the irony of a group of Scots-Chinese Malaysians and Swedes singing about founding a new Jerusalem on God's green England.

But that's another story.

Anyway, the friends from London are in town, as well as the stylist who lives in Greece and who is getting married in a couple of weeks in Athens. So we had dinner with about 10 people down at the Nordic Light Hotel, drinking way too much red wine and smoking way too many cigarettes on a school night.

Both M., the T.V. producer, and the husband had veal, which was tasteless according to four different palates (not mine, I didn't try it). The waitress apologized, saying the chef had forgotten the marinade. Er, I ask, how can the chef forget the marinade - isn't the idea of a marinade that the, uh, meat sits for hours and hours in some kind of spiced bath? But, the husband let it pass, except after the waitress went back to her spot by the bar, he and M. and this other girl were making some strange joke about tastebuds and onions and tits, which had to be explained to me because they all involve the same word, lök, which means onion... it must be related somehow to the English word leek. And I learned that the word for tastebud is smaklök, which literally translated is taste onion. Kind of a strange concept, if you ask me, but then tastebud is kind of strange itself if you think about it.

So there you have it, two Swedish words for the price of one. - Francis S.

It's such a pain in the ass to have to explain to people here all about us wacky Americans. They always ask the same question: What is this thing Americans have with guns?

I always try to explain that there is an amendment to the constitution, that it says the citizenry has the right to arm itself so a lot of people think this means they should be allowed to have guns, lots of them, one for every day of the week, guns in all colors, flavors and sexual preferences. I tell them that it isn't entirely clear that the amendment means all guns, all the time, 24-hours a day. And then I'm at a loss. I can't explain why Americans seem to have this need for guns, and why once a year some kid(s) go into a school and shoot up a bunch of people before committing suicide and Americans never seem to be able to connect the fact that these things happen, well, because the guns are out there for the taking. I try to say that not everyone thinks that guns are such an, uh, essential fashion accessory, but somehow despite this they can't seem to manage to pass very many gun-control laws. I try to come up with an explanation, but I just always end up red-faced and stupid.

Especially last night at dinner with the girl (a friend of A., the model) who was visiting from Africa, where she works for the tribunal that is dealing with the judgment against those who committed the massacre in Rwanda. They mostly didn't use guns in Rwanda, apparently they used machetes.

The Swedish word for the day is otrolig. It means unbelievable. - by Francis.S.

What is there about Wally Shawn that makes him so funny? His voice, maybe, that vague watery lisp. Or it could be his goofy smile. I guess I just like him. He makes me laugh. - by Francis S.

Jesus, it's cold. Winter is on its way. My poor neanderthal bones are freezing. I finally understand the Swedish obsession with the weather. Last ''summer,'' with its week after week of 15-degree rainy days, was a blow and when November hit, everyone was demoralized and depressed. They were actually angry - depression is anger turned inwards, yes? - and bitter. Me, I thought it was a bit early to be so hostile, but I later realized it was anticipatory. If you are cheated out of summer, by February you will about be done in. And I enjoy winter, particularly snowy and cold winters - I grew up in Chicago after all. Still, I'm as weak as the next guy, and so when we had a glorious summer this year, I was ecstatic and I gloried in the sound of drunken girls on the street below at Bonden and La Cucaracha, laughing and falling and singing early in the morning when we were trying to sleep during the darkest hours of the night, those two hours of twilight that Stockholm is allotted each day at the height of the summer.

But, it's over now. Although we'll cheat it by going to the States next week, grabbing for ourselves an extra week of heat. And I hear it is hot in North America.

* * * * *

The husband and I are soon off to dinner with the model, A., and her boyfriend the photographer and his two children. There's sure to be good food - probably something Italian, or maybe Thai. I'm ravenous.

The Swedish word for today is deprimerad. It means depressed. - by Francis S.

There's another Tilda Swinton movie out. I used to think she was too, er, removed from herself - a figure posing in a tableaux or something, not wanting to soil herself with the emotions of everyone around her.

But then I saw her as Eve and she was such a bundle of angry hopped-up sex, ripping the role apart with her bare teeth and hurtling over the top without looking down to see that she's ten miles above the surface of the earth and if she fell, it would no doubt be a nasty, smelly mess to clean up.

But she didn't fall, oh no.

The scene where she smears lipstick on her blouse in a fit of anger, or the one where she's trying on some piece of haute couture lingerie, strutting and tugging at the utterly sheer fabric that's giving her a wedgie both front and back- it's a size too small for her - parading her stuff in front of a baffled man waiting for his wife to come out of the changing room. Holy shit.

The movie itself is pretty flawed, some parts are awful. But her performance turns the thing into a spectacular film. It's weird how so many of the greatest movies just seem to crash and burn at the end, like Apocalypse Now, or sometimes on and off throughout the whole movie, crashing and then picking themselves up from the wreckage only to crash again - My Own Private Idaho or Satyricon, for instance.

I wonder if it's true that Tilda Swinton is a countess or a baroness or some other member of the English peerage. As if that would mean anything. I don't like to admit I still have that sad American fascination with noble blueblood types. - Francis S.

The thing about moving to Europe is that you lose your fashion sense. Although it is possible I lost it due to age more than for any particular geographic reason. Still, it's long gone and I'm completely dependent on the husband - an actual arbiter of fashion here in Sweden - as to what looks good together on this continent.

For instance, I'm wearing these miu miu grey- and- pink- and- silver- glam- sneaker- shoe things this morning, walking to work and I start thinking to myself, uh, do these look okay with these white trousers and this white plasticky dentist-type shirt I'm wearing, and, are they appropriate for work? Are these trousers hip enough or do they scream pathetic old man? Or worse, am I a pathetic old man for real and these shoes in fact could only possibly look good on someone half my age? Either scenario is frightening to contemplate.

But I used to know what I liked. What to wear. What was appropriate.

Perhaps the trouble is that I've gone post-gay. Or is that post-straight? The repercussions are mind-boggling.

And the Swedish word for the day is skådespelare. It means actor. - Francis S.

It poured rain this morning, came down like bolts of cloth unfurling from the heavens and making it utter hell to wend one's way through Gamla Stan, the old town of Stockholm. Some of the streets are paved in brick, some in stone and worst of all, some are cobbled with those round stones that are impossible to walk on - what in god's name were 16th century engineers thinking when they paved a road with those round lumpy stones? It's like walking up a set of bad teeth. And when it rains, the water flows in torrents down Kåksbrinken from Stortorget, carrying 80-year-old German ladies in its wake, little old ladies clutching at their maps and shrieking, you have to be careful that they don't grab you as you dodge past, be careful that they don't take you down with them.

This - the little old German ladies and the rest of their fellow tourists - is probably the only thing I don't like about working here. Otherwise, it's quite wonderful to walk down the steps at Mosebacke each day and see Gamla Stan laid out like a perfect toy city below with the spires of the German Church and Storkyrkan, the rows of houses along Kornhamnstorget, the square top of the Royal Palace. Of course I then have to walk through dirty, ugly, serviceable Slussen - the sluice - before I actually get into Gamla Stan, walking past Järntorget 84 (which I just realized you can see on the 500 Kronor note) and up the narrowest street imagineable, Mårtin Trotzigsgränd, it's only wide enough for one person to pass through at the top. Then past the school and the old German quarter, then finally over to Köpmansgatan, and on to the little square with the statue of St. George and the Dragon in the center, the princess on a pillar by herself in the corner.

Today's Swedish phrase is: att skynda på. It means to hurry along. - Francis S.

Last week, the workmen who are renovating this apartment building appeared outside the window at 7:15 a.m. Actually, they didn't just appear, they clamored noisily up the scaffolding all in a rush and peered in through the transom windows at me and the husband lying in bed. Squinting through one eye (rather useless without its contact lens), I could just see the top of a bald head and hear an Irish voice trying to sing some song about ordering beer for breakfast.

I could sense their disappointment because I'm sure they were planning on getting a glimpse of the bare flesh - a leg, or maybe with a little luck, half a nipple or an ass cheek - of the editor's wife. She is luxe, calme and volupté rolled into one, and ripe as a ripe peach. Instead, all they got was a glimpse of a couple of unshaven and rumpled-looking fellows faking sleep. Or at least I was faking sleep. Not the husband, he sleeps like a baby (except if he hears something untoward going on outside. He can read any sound, can tell if it's good or bad, in his sleep. Like he can tell the difference if it's one of the Finnish ladies bringing their laundry down into the garden at 4 a.m. , or someone trying to make off with one of the bikes parked there. He can tell just by the sound which of the three neighbors on our floor has just opened their door and is depositing their garbage in the hall, which will then sit there for a week.)

Anyway, I guess the workmen are all confused about who the hell exactly lives in this apartment, and how exactly they live here. Maybe they figured out the editor and his wife are gone. Maybe not. The Irish guy with the shaved head sure wasn't too friendly this morning, though. Still smarting from last week's disappointment, I guess. But not so much that he didn't manage to yank all the toilets out today and dump them in the garden. It looks like there's been a toilet massacre out there. And that includes our toilet. O, the horror. We're going to be without our own personal toilet for weeks.


The Swedish word of the day is skitsnygg. It means fucking gorgeous. - Francis S.

M., the t.v. producer, came over last night. So M. and the husband and I ended up drinking whiskey, smoking cigarettes and watching bad movies until all hours. Or half-watching them. A costume drama about the Sun King, with Gerard Depardieu of course. I think it's in the code of the screen actors' guild that all movies about France must include Gerard Depardieu. In this particular movie, the poor guy is doomed because he won't wear a wig like everyone else. Uma Thurman, in a reprise of her role in Dangerous Liaisons, plays a wicked countess who sleeps with Gerard and then betrays him because he won't wear a wig. Of course, she's a quivering, quaking snotty mess when she finds out that Gerard kills himself over some bad fish. Kills himself rather spectacularly, I might add. I don't want to give away the plot, but just suffice it to say that the scene involves a horse, some firecrackers, and a castrato singing Lully arias suspended over a pool in a papier maché whale. Oh, and Tim Roth plays the villain, sneering and snorting in an unfortunate wig. I think that's some part of the code of the screen actors' guild as well. Tim Roth must play the villain and there has to be some weird hairy thing going on.

The husband fell asleep after five minutes.

And I think I missed some important parts because throughout the movie, M. kept telling me about his grandmother who lives in a town outside of Bratislava. He said she's resting on her laurels. Or rather her late husband's laurels. He was a famous Czech artist. Apparently, she hasn't clued into the fact that she's no longer living a standard of living significantly above that of the hoi-polloi now that the communists are no longer in power. According to M., this means she spends an hour and a half putting on her makeup before she goes out in her leopard-skin furs, stepping heedlessly into the traffic. I'm not sure I get the connection here, but maybe I'm confusing her story with the movie.

Swedish word of the day: genomsnitt. It means average. - Francis S.

They're gone. The magazine editor and his wife left this morning at 5 a.m. with god knows how many kilos worth of baggage. No plastic garbage bags full of winter coats, or cardboard boxes held together with packing tape and optimism - everything was in proper suitcases, all very First World. With the first rainfall in weeks punctuating the melancholy at seeing them leave, they jumped in the car on the first leg of their journey to America. And I went back up to the apartment, unable to sleep, reduced to reading about Al Gore growing a beard in Dagens Nyheter, boning up on America as if I were the one leaving and not them. - Francis S.