It must be embarrassing for a company when advertising gains something in translation, something unintended and, well, perhaps a little sordid, inappropriate at a minimum - especially advertising that is published in a country's No. 1 newspaper.

I wonder if heads are rolling in the marketing department at Locum - which I originally thought was a Swedish realtor but the husband informs me it is some kind of public hospital organization - ?

The Swedish word for the day is misstag. It means error.

- by Francis S.

With my beloved little brother, I used to play a game that I'm sure many of you have played: if a classic and wretched television show - "The Andy Griffith Show," for example (that show ran in reruns throughout my childhood and I always hated it) - were made into a movie, who would play Andy, Barney, Aunt Bea, Opie, and so on. You could go for the outré - Fairuza Balk as Aunt Bea (Fairuza looks great in white hair) - or the realistic - John Turturro as Barney Fife. Or just go for plain old humor - Spike Lee as Opie.

This was all quite entertaining, until they started actually making these movies. (Uh, who's playing Shaggy in the upcoming Scooby-Doo movie, anyone know?)

But, it looks like Jonno's boyfriend, Richard, has a much funnier, vaguely related alternative: the perfect pitch.

- by Francis S.

We finally christened the shower last night. I hope that noise doesn't travel down the pipes to all our various neighbors below, but I have my suspicions that it does.

The Swedish word for the day is pinsamt. It means embarrassing.

- by Francis S.

It was bound to happen. The meta-test. Please excuse the use of the prefix "meta." (A tip of the hat to David).

- by Francis S.

K. has gone back to the New World, with a brief layover in Iceland. She tells me that on the way here, she discovered that the airport, Keflavik, has been completely remodeled. It's no longer basically a hallway with a bunch of doors off of it that are the gates. Instead, it's now full of glass and Escher-like, as you take the up escalator you can see where you are supposed to be on the down escalator, but you can't figure out how to get there. Which I suppose is just as vaguely hallucinatory as the long hallway was, considering how whacked out one invariably is on a dark midwinter Iceland layover.

I was in the middle of a meeting outside the office when she left, natch, and I hadn't managed to say goodbye to her and when I realized it, I suddenly had to excuse myself and give her a ring from the men's room, although I didn't tell her that's where I was.

She'll be back in January.

While she was here, I introduced her to Queer as Folk (the original British version - I haven't seen the U.S. version) and she was instantly addicted, hating the character of Stuart at the beginning and then having a huge crush on him by the end, finding that the actor who played Vince looked like a certain type of Boston Irish frat boy that she finds, er, unattractive.

''They showed this on channel 1 on Swedish television?'' she asked.

Yes, the husband told her. But kind of late, like 10:30 or maybe 11 o'clock. They could never show that in America, the husband asked, could they?

''Not on the American version of channel 1,'' she said. And indeed, America allows rather extreme violence on network television, but not near-naked men simulating sex (and there weren't even any hard-ons. No real, uh, soft-ons either, if I recall correctly). Because we Americans are so weird about sex.

I wonder, is it still true that there are a significant number - maybe not the majority, but still - of undergraduates who actually believe that it is better not to have sex unless it's with that special someone, preferably someone they are about to marry or, in some cases, on their wedding night?

Because this is what these horrible "Take back your hymen" and "Scared sexless" and "Sex suspect" sex education programs preach: Sex is something to be afraid of. Which is an awful thing to teach someone.

So, the Swedish word for the day has got to be sex. It means both the number six, as well as sex, which can make for some interesting confusion on occasion.

- by Francis S.

I've always said I don't really miss anything from the U.S.

I've been lying all this time and didn't realize it, until now.

I miss Lesbian Christmas musicales.

The Swedish word for the day is gullig. It means cute.

- by Francis S.

We at long last have a shower. There are no lights in it yet, and there are still some pieces of hardware missing, but if we put some candles on the floor and keep the door open, we can take long hot showers to our hearts' content. The husband was ecstatic despite his nasty cold.

Of course the cold wasn't nasty enough to stop him from vacuuming and mopping the floors throughout the apartment even though I told him he should be lying on the sofa drinking tea. Which is okay, I suppose. It always makes him feel better to clean things.

Me, I like it neat, but I hate cleaning. That's what cleaning ladies are for.

The Swedish word for the day is tvål. It means soap.

- by Francis S.

So, in response to World AIDS Day, and in keeping with my participating in Link and Think, today's writing is about, well, HIV and AIDS.

Make sure you're in a comfortable chair with something tasty to nibble on, because it's gonna be a long story.

I first remember reading about it - in the Washington Post I think - before it had a name. I was living with my ex in this teeny-tiny studio apartment at 7th and A Streets NE, in Washington, D.C. This would have been 1983 or so. Gay men, drug addicts and Haitians were all getting weird cancers, their immune systems pathetically feeble and failing them utterly.

It didn't register much at first.

But over time, the facts became less hazy and this phenomenon acquired a name, two names in fact: AIDS - acquired immune deficiency syndrome - and ARC - AIDS-related complex. AIDS killed you, but ARC was a sort of pre-AIDS, or maybe it never led to fullblown AIDS. They just didn't know. They hadn't yet discovered what exactly caused it, but they more or less knew that it could be transferred through sex or sharing needles. They thought maybe drugs - poppers, amyl nitrate - had something to do with it. Everything was shrouded in mystery, and a lot of people were scared that they could catch AIDS from drinking from the same glass of water a gay man had just drunk from.

By 1984-1985, the worry had set in for us. Sometime around then it was discovered that HIV causes AIDS. I decided it would be highly likely that I had contracted HIV sometime in the years before 1982, before I'd gotten together with my ex. And what made the worry terrible in some ways was that my ex refused to get tested, reasoning that since there was nothing they could do about it anyway, and since we were monogamous, it would only make his life worse to know.

Me, I went along with him, not because I agreed, but because that was what he wanted.

Looking back on it, this virus was lurking in the back of our minds all the time, every day. Any cold or flu bug, any feelings of fatigue, any bruise, all were examined closely but silently - I never spoke of any of it for fear of getting my ex upset. And I assumed the worst. It's so strange to look back on it now, I've really forgotten completely how much that damned virus haunted me.

In 1987, when I came back from two years at university in Manhattan with my degree in hand, and after I had gotten my first real job, at my instigation we contacted the Whitman Walker Clinic, which had started as a free VD clinic for gay men in the '70s, and early on in the epidemic had become the primary institution serving people with HIV in Washington DC. We became "buddies" with a man who was critically ill. We underwent several days of training, even attending a weekend-long workshop on death. Our buddy, G., lived in one of the six houses that the clinic maintained for people who had no other place to go.

We met him in December, and by February he had died. We visited him several times weekly, fixed meals for him, brought him to the doctor, took him shopping and out to a restaurant once; within a month of our meeting him, he was bedridden and couldn't go out.

His funeral was held in the Church of God of the Two Worlds, a strange vaguely Christian spiritualist church. He was buried somewhere outside Shepardstown, W. Virginia. We hardly knew him, not really.

We never became buddies with anyone else after G. died. Fear, I suppose. It brought it all too close, especially since we didn't know our own status. I did know, however, that several of my good friends were HIV positive. My high school sweetheart (the male one), another guy with whom I'd lived with briefly in Atlanta. My best friend in D.C. who'd moved to Chicago.

I guess it must have been in 1989 or 1990 that my ex finally decided that he wanted to know. I'm not sure, perhaps AZT had just shown up on the scene, although I seem to think this was before then. Whatever it was, he had decided that not knowing was worse than knowing could be.

We went to our doctor, who wasn't gay, but said that we should not have our insurance pay for the test because then they would discriminate against us. He would do it anonymously. He was a wonderful doctor.

Waiting that week - it took a week in those days - was utter hell. Mostly because my ex was crazed. Me, I'm pretty good at ignoring things, pushing them down into the back of my mind somewhere. And despite my knowing all these people and having witnessed someone, more or less, die from it, it wasn't real to me anyway.

The results came back negative.

I suppose that our lives changed at that moment. But to be honest, I don't remember it, not really.

- by Francis S.

I met my high school sweetheart - the one who was a boy, not the one who was a girl - in my freshman acting class. He was two years older than me, and he knew my sister.

He was a rather visible presence in our high school of 2,500 students, which was quite a feat. He was an artist, he was obsessed with history, he was wickedly funny and earnest, he did stupid things like running around with a red magic marker, ''slashing'' the throats of various teachers, which nearly got him expelled.

He was the leader of a large group of students who didn't quite fit in anywhere else - some of them were vaguely into acting or debate or orchestra, some were sort of jocks, but all of them were somehow outside the groups of students who were really into those things.

And, most important of all, my friend Mary said, "Robert Feiger told me that he fools around with boys." This, however, was not a generally known fact.

Five months later, on a school trip to London, I found out, as I'd hoped, that this was true. He fooled around with boys, and he really liked me. It was a huge release to have sex with him, to passionately kiss someone who was physically a man (I was small and a late-bloomer; he was hairy and muscular though he was only 17). It also made me terribly sad, I wandered around London with him, morose in most bittersweet way, feeling as if I'd lost something and that I was no longer a child.

So we became boyfriends. Secret boyfriends, but real boyfriends nonetheless. The relationship was full of drama and clandestine sex. Everything an adolescent love affair should be, despite the need to hide it all. I think he felt guilty about it, but I didn't, not really, mostly because early on I told my sister about it and she let me know that not only was there nothing wrong with this, but that it was in fact a good thing.

The relationship lasted on and off for a good six years, through both of us going off to college, through him getting his first - and only - job at the Washington Post and finally ended when I moved to D.C. to be with him. (After three weeks, we called it quits for good.)

But we stayed in touch. He left the Post and moved to Boston, working as a freelancer. I stayed in D.C. and, more or less, got married, bought a house and became firmly ensonced in the oddly dangerous safety of being part of a couple.

He lost some of his charm. His ideosyncracies became irritating, his earnestness became shrill, his convictions turned into pomposity. I found him hard to take. I suppose I'm still angry with him, somehow, for not living up to what I wanted him to always be.

He called me one day when I was at the office and told me that he had been raped. He had been raped and had contracted HIV. It had happened in Boston Common, a group of thugs, he said, had beaten him up and violated him.

It made me sad, and irritated that he only talked to me when he had bad news. And I suppose I pulled away from him. I suppose it scared me as well. I didn't know what to do or say, and I felt useless, helpless and outside his life.

We didn't see each other for quite awhile after this. Then, several years later, my beloved little brother was visiting and we went to the National Gallery. In the room with all those lovely Dutch paintings - Rembrandt and Hals portraits, a Vermeer - we ran into him. He was visiting Washington as well. And so, we got back into touch, briefly.

The next year, I went to Chicago one late spring week for a conference, and I decided to see him. He had moved back in with his parents.

He had turned frail, although I was very ungenerous with him. He looked well enough, but he required a cane to walk. I thought he was deliberately courting pity. He couldn't see very well, he said, but I thought he seemed to be able to see just fine. We sat and had coffee in a cafe that was in what had been the paint store on the main street of the town we had both grown up in, and it seemed to me he wanted people to look at him and see that he was dying, and this made me intensely irritated, and then ashamed of myself for being irritated.

He told me he was having portions of his journal and drawings published in the Post, the diary of a dying man. And he talked about how much he regretted having treated his parents badly, of having been unfair to his longtime Finnish boyfriend, of never having given love a chance. And I could only say to him that he had had a great life nonetheless, done things and been things that he should be most proud of. But even though you must say such things, that you know them to be true, they don't seem to give solace.

They did publish the diaries, a couple of months after he died, which was not quite a year after my visit to Chicago.

I couldn't read those diaries, mostly because he retold the story of being raped, but changed the details so significantly that I can only believe them to be a lie, which I suspected from the beginning. And it upset me so that he felt he had to lie about such a thing, that he must have felt such shame at thinking that he was somehow responsible for contracting HIV that he needed to concoct a story that removed any possible blame. As if one should possibly blame him, that blame is a word that should ever, ever be associated with HIV.

It makes me cry still, as I write this, and makes me furious with him. It's hard to have such feelings about someone you love. And I still, five years after the fact, don't really think that he is dead.

Finally, it is ironic and I sometimes catch myself wondering whether he has somehow manouvered my life so that I have ended up in Scandinavia, a place he always romanticized all out of proportion and where he wanted always to live but never did.

- by Francis S.

My best buddy, K., is in town.

I'm finally over my hangover resulting from a) forgetting to eat both lunch and dinner yesterday; and b) drinking too much beer with K last night.

K. used to work with me, sitting at the desk next to mine. I love her because we have almost the exact same sense of humor, a sense of humor that relies heavily on needless repetition, utter idiocy and wanton hyperbole. Who would have thought I would move to Stockholm and find a fellow American who thinks the same stupid things are funny as I do? Not me, not me.

She moved back to the States about a year ago, although she's been back here in Stockholm for a total of three months since then. Still, I hadn't realized how very much I missed her, as we sat in the window in Kleins, smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes apiece (yeah, yeah, I know, I quit) and having a field day with all the shit that has happened to us over the past 6 months or so. Like her breaking up with her boyfriend. Like me explaining yet again why I've decided I can be happy not having kids, and then for the first time in 10 years thinking, hell, maybe I've changed my mind. Maybe I do want to have kids after all.

Of course I haven't had a chance to mention this revelation to the husband because he was sound asleep when I stumbled in the door last night at 11:45.

The Swedish word for the day is bebis. It means baby.

- by Francis S.

I've now added two blog-related links in response to World AIDS Day.

But, isn't that an awful name for it? Didn't it used to be World AIDS Awareness Day? It makes it sound too much like it's a celebration, a holiday, a feast in honor of AIDS, rather than an observance. And worse, it sounds as if the whole world and all the people in it should aspire to getting AIDS.

Oh well.

- by Francis S.

The Christmas trees are up in Stortorget, Kornhamnstorg and Mosebacke torg. Greenery and white lights are hanging from the second storeys of the houses lining the winding streets of Gamla Stan. The big department store, NK, has gone all out, as usual, with its own greenery and lights. On Skeppsbron, they've even put together the huge live tree (pieced together somehow from parts of smaller trees, it's very barbaric but the result is a picture-perfect hundred-foot tree). And last but not least, my favorite, the julmarknad - Christmas market - is up in Stortorget as well: two rings of red wooden stalls selling glögg, pepparkakor and cheap little wooden trinkets.

So now it's time to learn one of the two Swedish snaps visor - drinking songs - that I can actually sing, one especially popular at Christmastime:

Hej, tomtegubbar slå i glasen och låt oss lustiga vara!
Hej tomtegubbar slå i glasen och låt oss lustiga vara!
En liten tid
Vi leva här
Med mycket möde och stort besvär!
Hej, tomtegubbar slå i glasen och låt oss lustiga vara!

And dammit, I can't find a real translation, but my own version, taking many liberties with the language, would go something like this:

Hey, goblins, toss back a glass and let's have fun.
Hey, goblins, toss back a glass and let's have fun.
We only live here a short while, and life is full of awful hardship and terrible trouble.
So, goblins, toss back a glass and let's have fun.

As you can see, the Swedes have a rather grim sense of humor.

I love it.

- by Francis S.

Woo-hoo. Another language milestone has been passed. My first (heavily edited) article in Swedish will be coming out in one of the company's magazines, a sort of Swedish Gourmet produced for the company that makes Absolut vodka.

I've contributed before with short restaurant reviews that I wrote in English and then were translated, but this one - on a surreal meal I ate at a restaurant in Mykonos shortly after the beginning of the nastiness in the United States - I actually wrote myself in Swedish.

Which isn't to say that I'm not still a big fat sissy when it comes to speaking Swedish. It's just that it's a lot safer to write it.

The Swedish word for the day is stolt. It means proud.

- by Francis S.

Talk about self-referential experiences. I just got back from seeing Moulin Rouge - movies come late to Sweden, although to be honest this has been out for awhile - and the movie theater we saw it at is called the rödda kvarn, which means red mill. Which is what moulin rouge means, of course. Then to top the whole thing off, the actual red curtains in the theater do some strange elaborate choreographed number, going in and out of each other, then finally opening properly, immediately followed by the opening of the movie, which consists of red curtains opening behind a tiny conductor.

The whole thing was mind-boggling.

- by Francis S.

Being a tourist gives one such a strange impression of a place. Lisbon, for instance, seems to be a place that has never quite re-achieved the glory of its golden age before the big earthquake hit. That was, oh, 250 years ago. Everything is imbued with a sense of former greatness, of sadness and longing, of brutality, of dust and smoke.

But I suppose it's hard not to get such an impression if you spend your days visiting the ruins of castles perched on hills, reading that where the current national theater sits at one end of Rossio square used to sit the palace of the inquisition, and that the center of the square was a popular site for countless numbers of everyone's favorite public spectacle, the auto da fé, which was quite the trendy thing in its day. Nothing like burning people alive when it comes to thrilling spectator sports.

We visited museums filled with Persian velvets and portraits by Rembrandt, we saw various summer palaces in Sintra, fishing villages perched on cliffs tumbling down into the Atlantic, and we watched the sun set at the point furthest west on continental Europe at Cabo da Roca. We ate cod and wild boar and cheese pastries. We took wild tram rides up and down the hills of Lisbon. From the balcony of our hotel, we watched the town of Cascais turn an uncertain pink with the dusk, the fishing boats moving ever so slowly like black cows grazing in the water, the lighthouse at last flashing as the dark finally took over.

And yet it feels so wonderful to be home in good old Sweden at last.

The husband is overjoyed to be ridding everything in the apartment of the thick layer of dust that the workmen managed to leave although they weren't actually supposed to be even doing anything, anything at all.

The Swedish word for the day is bekväm. It means comfortable.

- by Francis S.

This morning is one of those sublime winter mornings. Strangely, although the sky is mostly blue there were stray snowflakes tumbling down as I walked out onto the street from the apartment. Then, walking down the steps on the bluff at Mosebacke, spread below me was Gamla Stan, the old town, lit by that strange, glancing winter sun, picking out the fancy brickwork and lacy iron on the spire of the German church and making it look even more beautiful than it is.

The husband and I are off to Lisbon tomorrow morning first thing. I can't begin to describe how badly I need this holiday. We'll be back in a week, bringing with us tales and veritable sonnets from the Portuguese (apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poems had nothing to do with Portugal but rather referred to a nickname of hers).

The Swedish verb for the day is att resa. It means to travel.

- by Francis S.

I wonder if I've been eating so much sushi - lunch and dinner yesterday, plus lunch today, none of it my choice - that I am in danger of getting parasites. How much sushi does it take, statistically, to get some kind of nasty wormlike thing living the high life in one's intestines, inviting its friends over for all-night keg parties and puking all over the, uh, front lawn, so to speak...?

The Swedish word for the day is fisk. It means fish.

- by Francis S.

When I lived in Barcelona, I told all my friends in the United States that I had no intention of becoming an expatriate, that I was American through and through. Which I suppose I believed.

''Ex-patriots are such an unhealthy lot,'' I said. ''They hang out in incestuous little groups and drink too much, complaining about the country they live in, having untidy affairs with each other and regretting it.''

And I had planned all along to go back at the end of my stay, which I did. But in-between I met the husband, and ended up despite my best intentions, an expatriate up in the far north reaches of the world.

I try very hard not to complain about Sweden, and I try very hard to avoid sundry groups of alcoholic expatriates that most definitely do exist, even in Stockholm.

But it does feel odd sometimes, not that I ever really miss the States. And of course there is an assumption made by certain other people that I won't stay. For instance, I just got a letter from the moving company that shipped my things over from the New World to the Old. The letter was in English of course, and noted that most people who move to Sweden only stay a couple of years, and wasn't I thinking of moving, and they would be happy to move me if, as most people, I was about to move since my two years were up.

The husband was quite insulted by this letter. It didn't bother me much. I think the reality is that most people don't stay.

Me, I'm in it for the long haul.

The Swedish word for the day is tålamod. It means patience.

- by Francis S.

I've just snuck away to my desk, escaping from an office party for the company's customers. There is nothing worse than this kind of party - the schmoozing, the smiling and laughing, the unfortunate choice of entertainment (a fake talk show with some well-known Swedish journalist), the mediocre finger food, the dirty napkins, and the people, oh, the people. I'm going to have to go back in a minute. I absolutely loathe it.

The Swedish word for the day is bajskorv. Literally, it means something like poo sausage, but a better translation would be poop. It's a little kid cuss.

- by Francis S.

Oh, and happy anniversary to America's favorite gay ex- roommate bi- coastal bloggin' not- really sweethearts, Choire and Philo of eastwest.nu.

If you want to forget the latest hell going on in New York, I highly recommend Choire's novel in progress, all part of this write- a- novel month or whatever exactly the long, proper name is, otherwise known as November. The novel started out tarty enough, but now seems to have taken a turn for the outré, making me laugh out loud (I think it was the animal- rights fanatic deprogramming camp that did it.)

The Swedish word for the day is grattis. It means congratulations and should not be confused with gratis, which means free, as in ''along with your 15-piece ginsu knive set, you get this free key chain cast from Ari Fleisher's actual lips.''

- by Francis S.

Oh, poor New York City.

- by Francis S.

I just bought four Garbos tårar - Garbo's tears - at Gustafssons Konditori. I wonder who first thought up the idea of naming pastries after fascinating women? Swedish pastries definitely follow the named- after- famous- chicks rule, with pastries called "Tosca." Or "Garbo." Although I'm not sure that Garbo would have had such sweet chocolatey raspberryish almond- pastey champagney tears. Her smiles, now those were meltingly beautiful, but I would imagine her tears to have been much more bittersweet.

- by Francis S.

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.

Aw, shit. I realized I was whining on and on about Daylight Savings' Time and I got it all wrong. We are now back on regular time, so in fact Daylight Savings' Time does actually give you more evening light, but just in the summer.

My question now is, why don't we just shift the time altogether? It's not like there is some kind of supreme clock that we need to abide by or God will punish us with famine, pestilence and bad television.

The Swedish phrase for the day is dum i huvudet. A slightly loose translation would be dumbhead.

- by Francis S.

Where exactly did the phrase ''Daylight Savings' Time'' come from? I vaguely recall that the concept was instituted during the War (WWI or WWII, take your pick) to help farmers by giving them more time to work in the fields. Although the only extra time it would seem to give is to the poor farm children who need daylight to do chores before going to school. I don't see how it saves daylight at all. And while it was nice to get that extra hour of sleep yesterday, it's so dark now. Daylight Savings' Time seems, at this point, mainly to benefit people who for some strange reason like to be up early in the morning.

I don't understand.

The Swedish phrase for the day is klockan 6.59, which is the time the sun rose this morning in Stockholm. This particular time could be expressed in several ways, one of them being en i sju - one before seven - or sex-femtio-nio - six fifty-nine. The pronunciation is even more interesting, but I'm not so good on proper phonetic spelling, and the proper pronunciation of the word sju here in Stockholm is nearly impossible to describe: the sj is sort of like an sh spoken through slightly more clenched teeth and with the tongue low in the mouth and almost touching the lower teeth as opposed to more raised, rounded and touching the sides of the upper teeth. It also requires blowing more, and making almost a wh sound as well. It's probably the most difficult Swedish sound for an English speaker.

- by Francis S.

I adore my little brother.

Halloween is no big thing here, it exists, but they tend to celebrate it on the wrong day, and people are a bit confused by it. For instance, my friends J. and R. had little kids in masks ring their doorbell last year. ''Did you want something?'' J. asked them. They merely shrugged. She gave them some cornflakes.

So, I have to get a halloween fix vicariously (not that I ever went all out with a crazy costume when I lived in the States, but I did usually go to a party or two).

This is where my little brother comes in. He went to a party last night, dressed as Hedwig. And his girlfriend went as Tommy Gnosis.

You must understand, of course, that my little brother would make a great football player. He's one big barrel-chested muscular guy.

''My friends said I was scaring them,'' he said. ''Maybe it was the bad glitter makeup. And the players from the women's soccer game that I was the ref at earlier in the day kept on coming up to me and wanting to have their pictures taken with me.''

Scary indeed. I can only imagine, what with the blonde wig and a star-spangled outfit with a leather cape reading ''Yankee go home with me.''

He said he was very hungover this morning, but managed to get to his soccer game at nine a.m. and even score a goal before the end of the game.

''I'll tell you more later,'' he said.

The Swedish word for the day is lillebror. It means little brother.

- by Francis S.

We're about to toddle on off to have a glass of birthday wine with a friend, H. It'll be me and the husband and a bunch of Swedish music industry people. One of the nicest things about Sweden is that is has such a different attitude about famous people. No one goes up to famous film actors and asks for an autograph, rock stars don't get mobbed by crazed fans. People who are famous in Sweden pretty much get to go about their lives undisturbed, buying their groceries at the local grocery store, having a beer at a neighborhood pub. And if you do ever meet them, they tend to be pretty normal down-to-earth people. (I guess to be fair to stars in the U.S., it's hard to be down-to-earth when you're constantly surrounded by over-the-top adulation.)

The Swedish word for the day is ödmjuk. It means humble.

- by Francis S.

A new store (it's cooler than it looks from the Web site) has opened at last in our apartment building on the Farmer Street. They make nice things out of wood for one thing. It had been under construction for more than half a year.

Now, if only they'd hurry up and finish the renovation of the rest of the building. It keeps getting dragged out longer and longer. They already messed up in our bathroom and have to redo things, and they haven't even laid the tile yet. And the new radiators, which they also had to redo because they somehow managed to hang them unevenly, are sort of working - they're warm on the sides. But, it sounds like something between a bubbling brook and a leaky faucet in the bedroom, a constant and somehow unpleasant sound of water running haphazardly through copper pipes.

The Swedish word for the day is att gnälla. It means to whine.

- by Francis S.

Well, Melinda. This post is for you.

Are you sure you want to be an editor for a magazine? It definitely has its good points. One of them being the satisfaction of getting the finished magazine. Of course, I'm too much of a coward to actually read the magazine once it comes back from the printer (maybe sick of it, too.) I only leaf through it, barely glancing at the pages, waiting for somebody else to find the typos and mistakes.

Not that I'm above torturing those people who are brave enough to do it.

When my friend Å. had the first issue of a new magazine she was doing come out, my friend G. and I decided to play a little joke. Å. had just been at the printer in Finland and came back regaling us with stories about the stacks and stacks of porn next to the presses at the factory in Tampere. So, we cut out near-pornographic photos from fashion magazines (a sleazy guy in a bed; a naked ass bisected by the string of a string bikini) and carefully pasted them over the actual pictures. When the receptionist, who had been in on the conspiracy, delivered the doctored magazine to Å., she about had a heart attack.

Å. tells us that revenge is a bitch, and it comes unexpectedly.

And now you're probably saying to yourself, ''That Francis guy sounds like a jerk.'' But I'm not, I'm not! I just like a good joke now and then. Just ask Å. (The whole thing was G.'s idea, I was merely an accomplice.)

This is what adults do when they work at magazines.

The Swedish word for the day is skratta.. It means laugh.

- by Francis S.

Done.

I guess I'm conservative when it comes to, uh, design. Minimalist, too. And I seem to not like change all that much. Although I'd like to put in a vertical rule between the journal part and the links and about-the-author section, I just can't figure out how to easily do it, my HTML skills being extremely pathetic (please don't look at the frightening HTML behind this site, I beg of you.)

- by Francis S.

Please bear with me as I mess around with a new layout.

The Swedish word for the day is hopplös. It means hopeless.

-by Francis S.

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.

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.