I guess I need to do a little renovation around here, a bit of site consolidation - reduce, reduce, reduce.

The Swedish word for the day is banta. It means diet.

- by Francis S.

Riding horses seems to be a fun thing. Not that I really rode any horses this weekend. Oh, I sat on top of one, and was led around by the 17-year-old girl who owned the horse. I even wore one of those black velvet hats. But I wouldn't exactly call it riding. I felt like a little kid taking a pony ride as I was walked around the grounds of Steninge Palace in the far reaches of Stockholm. In fact, I couldn't quite meet the eyes of all the people wandering around the gardens. That stupid black hat didn't help. And then as I was walked on country roads outside the grounds and we met people who were really riding horses - by people, I mostly mean 15-year-old girls - horses that were moving fast because no one was leading them by a rope, I felt even more silly.

At least I didn't have to ride a pony, as crazy E. did.

Of course, we got to do some other fun things for our 500 kronor (each). For instance, we got to clean out the horses' stalls (you don't have to get every last little clump of shit out, apparently. Or maybe I just decided that myself about the time I started wondering why I had paid 500 kronor to clean up horseshit instead of someone paying me). We brushed the horses. We cleaned the dirt out from under their hooves. I even got to clean the shit out of one of the horse's tail with shampoo, water and a plastic brush.

And yet, it was completely satisfying and only made me feel that it could be fun to learn how to ride a horse. They seem to be high-strung, horses, but it sure looks like it's a thrill to ride them. I don't want to own one, no, but I wouldn't mind really knowing how to ride a horse.

(And of course it helped that the weather was perfect fall weather on Saturday, and Steninge Palace - which I seem to recall was built by some Swedish nobleman who was having an affair with Marie Antoinette and wanted a nice place to bring her for a little of the old in-out in-out, although the style seems a little old for that so maybe I'm wrong - is a charming spot with lovely lawns leading down to the water and typical Swedish baroque buildings, all painted yellow.)

The Swedish phrase for the day is jävla idioter, which means damn fools.

- by Francis S.

The Swedish phrase for the day is tack så hemskt mycket, which means thanks awfully much to Choire, co-proprieter of eastwest.nu and son of Jackie. The thank you is for paying to get rid of that annoying advertisement at the top of the page. You could say he's one of those men who go around all day doing nothing but good deeds that we call... good deed doers. But then again, if you read his blog, you would know this to be untrue. In fact, he seems to be a date goer.

Tonight we're off to the hinterlands of Stockholm to go spend a weekend together with crazy E. and her boyfriend. We'll be riding horses, which is something I've never done before, but I've been assured will give me aching muscles. No doubt there will be something to be said about this at a later date.

- by Francis S., thankful

I'm sitting here with a piggelin - a pale green pear-flavored popsicle, a real Swedish classic - trying to write with some logistical difficulty. I'm eating this traditional summer treat for children because it's soothing to my throat, which is bit raw from coughing all day. And, of course, because it's very tasty and satisfying. And because I need a little comfort.

For some reason it reminds me of the time I was stung by a bee when I was five. My mother kissed me and sat me in one of those round plastic wading pools, giving me a peeled cucumber to eat. So I sat in the pool, cried a little, ate my cucumber and felt better after awhile. It really did the trick.

The Swedish word for the day is tröst, which is a false cognate. It means solace and not trust. Förtroende is trust.

- by Francis S.

It's remarkable the long shadow the attacks in the U.S. have cast.

We now have a pilot in Sweden refusing to fly unless Middle-Eastern-looking men are removed from the plane. (Sorry, the story is only in Swedish.)

And Sweden always seemed so tolerant to me.

- by Francis S.

Just call me Lars.

At A.'s parents last night, we partook in a Swedish tradition that calls for a strong will, a strong stomach but a weak sense of smell: Surströmming. Which translates to something like rotten fish that smells like babyshit. Er, at least that's how I would translate it.

I should preface this all with the observation that to an American, Swedes have rather odd palates when it comes to comfort foods and important feast days such as Christmas and Midsummer. These holidays are connected with the eating of lots of cold preserved fish, herring mostly, in various sauces, served with plain boiled potatoes, knäckebröd - crisp bread - and cheese. At Christmas they generously add plain boiled ham and something called Janssons frestelse (which translates rather grandly into Jansson's temptation, rather a misnomer I would say considering it is sliced potatoes baked with cream and anchovies). No matter the holiday, however, it is important to include lots and lots of snaps, of which the most popular flavor would be caraway, I'd say.

There's also another lesser food holiday not universally celebrated and with no fixed date, a kräftskiva, or crayfish party, which is crayfish boiled with dill, served with knäckebröd and strong prästost (priest cheese), and of course snaps. This is usually held in mid-August when the crayfish are first in season.

The thing about these feasts is that there is nothing comforting about them to me. They are, um, okay I suppose, but a meal centered around cold fish just doesn't shout ''indulgence'' to me. My favorite is the kräftskiva... it's a lot of work and your fingers end up covered in small painful cuts, but while you're partaking, it's fun and tasty (as compared to eating herring).

But surströmming is rather another thing.

It is legendary in Sweden, coming from the north. The fish are kept in tin cans that tend to expand as if they were harboring enough botulism bacteria to poison the earth. When I saw them last night, the bulging cans were shouting ''danger'' and ''get out while you can''to me, but the Swedes just snickered and tried to make me open the can myself, warning me that it can actually explode and essentially ruin someone's kitchen. Because, of course, as soon as some air escapes from the can, there is an overpowering stench that smells remarkably like, well, shit from a killer baby.

So, I was fumbling with the can opener (they don't have can openers with handles that you twist, for some reason - everyone has these primitive things that require you to stab the can with a powerful blow, and then just keep gashing until you get the damn thing open somehow), a plastic bag over the can to prevent the foul liquid from spraying all over the kitchen, and of course I couldn't manage it. Finally, they took it away and opened it up themselves, giggling at the horrendous smell and everyone looking at me, their hands over their mouths.

Well, the smell is nasty, but it's bearable in fact. I mean, it certainly doesn't smell like anything edible, but it doesn't make you cough. Well, maybe just a little. But I felt like everyone was expecting me to react quite negatively somehow, confirm the horribleness, and so I said ''It smells like shit.''

Which seemed to be the appropriate response.

''He says it smells like shit,'' they laughed.

Well then the next step was to eat it. The fish was put on the table, next to the husband, who looked rather pale, and we were to make sandwiches of it with tunnbröd - a flat soft bread - or knäckebröd, and tomatoes, chopped onion, gräddfil (a thin sour cream) and tiny little pieces of the fish, which we deboned and cut up ourselves on our plates.

In fact, it tastes a bit like it smells, pungent and overripe, but it's not horrible by any means.

And of course, after five minutes your brain refuses to acknowledge that it's smelling something bad, provided the smell is continuous, so you kind of get over the stench and just eat.

''Oh, is it too bad?'' A.'s mother asked me.

''No, it's not too bad,'' I said.

''He says it's not too bad!'' they all said, and they laughed some more, but they were secretly proud of me, and proud of themselves, that they had fed me this rather peculiar but very traditional meal, that I had said it smelled as bad as they told me it would but I had eaten it readily. Everyone had played their proper roles, and played them well.

''Next time you'll eat two sandwiches!'' they said. ''You're a real Swede now!''

- by Francis S.

''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.