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

- by Francis S.

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

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

I am so very sick of this renovation.

- by Francis S.

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

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

- by Francis S.

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

- by Francis S.

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

- by Francis S.

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

And, well, I do agree with him mostly.

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

Policemen are your friend [sic].

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

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

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

Happy Swedish Halloween.

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

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

My mother used to recite this.

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

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

- by Francis S.

What is your family like?

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

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

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

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

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

Next is me, the oldest of The Boys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- by Francis S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- by Francis S.