I can think of no peace as sublime as the peace of waiting for a train at a country station on a warm Swedish summer evening. The dusk drawn out to what seems an impossible length, a silent and respectably modest country mansion barely visible through a curtain of green leaves on the other side of the station, a well-fed cat padding its way inscrutably along the train tracks, the husband and I nearly drunk with the luxury of not having to mind a 25-minute wait for the train.

Why does it charm me so that the train will only stop at the station if the engineer sees that there are passengers waiting on the platform to climb on board? How is it that all night trains give me the same odd feeling of being in a delicious limbo, between two lives along with all the rest of the odd people who ride the night train: a young French boy disappointed nearly to the point of aggression at failing to get the attention of a pair of Swedish teenagers with his inadequate English; a sixty-ish woman dressed to the nines and talking slowly and deliberately to her sixty-ish American guests, who are not dressed to the nines; a boy nearly weighed down in his seat from all the silver jewelry hanging from his fingers and wrists and neck.

Who are these people taking the night train back into the city after a day in the country?

The Swedish phrase for the day is på landet. It means in the countryside.

- by Francis S.

As we sat last evening drinking beers up at Mosebacke, looking out over the Baltic and the city of Stockholm spread out below, the drunken woman next to us pestering us in her slurred Swedish, M. the T.V. producer told one of his music video stories:

A Swedish back-up singer favored by a number of Swedish - and non-Swedish - popstars was signed by a small but prestigious Danish record company. M. was asked to produce the music video. He went down to Copenhagen and met with the record company, shaking hands all around and getting his moderate budget.

"She's very special," the record company executives said to him. "She'll be a hit with the gay club crowd in Spain and Germany. But she wants to do her own clothes and makeup, so just let her."

Uh, okay, M. thought.

So he and the back-up singer flew to California, where he collected an American co-producer among other crew members, and they went on to Las Vegas. M. didn't explain to us how he found all the various American crew members, but he did say that he thought that the American co-producer was probably not just a producer, but a serial murderer-rapist as well.

"I can't explain, " M. said. "He was just kind of scary in a serial murderer-rapist kind of way."

The husband and I nodded.

Once in Las Vegas, after a few problems with the co-producer, the production ended up in a suite in a big hotel. And the makeup artist and seamstress that M. had gotten, just in case, "collaborated" with the back-up singer and her, uh, artist friend in doing the makeup and clothes for the video. "It came out beautifully, all things considered," said M. "The shots were great and it looked fantastic."

After some scrimmaging, M. managed to wrest the film out of the American co-producer's hands and bring it back to Sweden and get it edited.

They showed the rough cut to the back-up singer. They touched up the film and magically got rid of the wrinkles and lines on the face of the back-up singer. At last, they sent the finished video down to Copenhagen and got their paychecks.

And then they heard nothing. For weeks and weeks.

Finally, curiosity got the best of M. He called the executives at the Danish record company and asked if they were happy with the video.

"She's fat," they said to M., their voices incredulous.

Well, yes, M. thought. Hadn't they actually met her before they signed her?

No.

The Swedish phrase for the day is ...och det spelar ingen roll ändå om hon ser ganska tjock ut, eller hur?. It means ... and it doesn't matter anyway if she looks fat, does it?

- by Francis S.

Blame Denmark.

Or rather, blame the so-called "Danish People's Party." And while you're at it you can also blame Sweden's biggest national newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (all links in Swedish - sorry!).

The big stink here is that the anti-immigrant Danish party placed a full-page ad in the Sunday edition of Dagens Nyheter. I think it was rather a shock for many Swedes to open the paper and see party chair Pia Sjaersgaard's big blond head next to a Danish flag and a Swedish flag. "We thank the Swedish people for their support..." the text read, more or less, with the implication being that although Swedish politicians have spoken out strongly against the Danish People's Party, the party has the support of the Swedish people.

So it seems that an awful lot of Swedes are mad at the paper for running the ad, and insulted at the implications made in the ad. Politicians of various stripes are worried that it will stir up racial animosity; other politicians are calling for much wider public debate on the issue of immigrants. Interestingly, the Sunday paper also included an opinion piece quoting a recent survey of the Swedish Integration Department which showed that 70 percent of Swedes favor a multicultural society with immigrants.

So I didn't know what to say to the guy from Barcelona in my Swedish class who asked me if Sweden really had as good race relations as it seemed from his week and a half here.

Does 70 percent equal good? What about the other 30 percent?

What's a responsible Swede to think, or do?

Blame Denmark!

The Swedish phrase for the day is det går inte. It means it doesn't work.

- by Francis S.

In my quest to gain dual Swedish-U.S. citizenship, I need to fill out a form. It is in fact an itsy-bitsy form, all things considered. I don't have to pledge allegiance to anything, reel off the names of Swedish kings or prime ministers, or even learn Swedish, for that matter. I simply have to fill out four pages of questions that ask what my name is, where and when I was born, what my parents' names are and where and when they were born, what the husband's name is and where and when he was born, when and where we were married, as well as where I work and for how long I've been working there.

Can this really be all that they want to know about me?

Ah, and they want to know when and where I've been outside of Sweden since I first arrived. There are only four spaces in which to put this information. Perhaps this is the trick. Because I need about 25 spaces.

My old passport was filled to the brim, with only three spaces left for new stamps before it expired.

I like the triangular stamps from Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur and the jetty at Kuah on Langkawi (Passport control at the jetty at Kuah was like something out of a wartime Hollywood B-movie, unsavory officials in crisp uniforms standing behind ancient and flimsy wooden tables, groups of vaguely desperate looking families with trunks and satchels and oddly shaped packages tied with string, and me feeling like I'm trying to get to Thailand under false pretences when I'm doing no such thing, it's all just delicious melodrama.)

I like the round stamps from Panama, too (You had to pay 50 U.S. dollars to get out of the country there. And the police hated Americans, because we'd bombed police headquarters when we attacked Panama back in the early '80s.)

Then there are all the non-descript rectangular stamps: Dorval (The first time I went to Montreal, they told me I didn't need a passport, but there actually was a passport control when it was time to get back to the States, and they gave me hell for not having mine. So the next time I visited my good friend L., I brought my passport. Oh, and you have to pay to get out of Montreal, as well. Only 15 Canadian dollars, though, I seem to recall.)

Nickelsdorf (At the border between Austria and Hungary, the police scared the hell out of me as they passed through the train, snarling in German and me not understanding a thing.)

Casablanca. And Prague, Bologna, Nice, Barcelona, Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle (I wouldn't have half of these now: The great thing about Schengen is that you don't have to stand in line in passport control to get a stamp in your passport every time you fly within the borders of the Schengen countries. The bad thing about Schengen is that you don't have to stand in line in passport control to get a stamp in your passport every time you fly within the borders of the Schengen countries.)

And Arlanda and O'Hare, over and over and over again.

It will be strange to have a Swedish passport. But I guess it means that I will have even fewer stamps, in the long run. And I'll always have to choose which passport to use where.

The Swedish phrase for the day is det är dags. It means it's about time.

- by Francis S.

It wasn't until I left my Swedish class at 1 p.m. this afternoon that the other American in the class reminded me that today is the Fourth of July. It's cold and raining, but I bet the American Embassy, not 500 meters from my office, is full of foreign service lackeys firing up American Embassy grills, while the wives of foreign service lackeys are husking American Embassy sweet corn and cutting up American Embassy watermelon. Yee-haw.

It's difficult to stop myself from writing nasty things about whatever possible orgy of nationalism is taking place in the States today, people waving flags like big old hard-ons in each others' faces to bravely show that they haven't, uh, had their meat beaten by terrorism. Or something like that.

I feel I barely have a right to criticize anymore. Although I noticed some migalomaniac ex-patriots were unable to restrain themselves.

So tell me, how is it really? Are you having fun?

There is no Swedish word for the day.

- by Francis S.

One of the oddest things to get used to here in Sweden is that instead of the vague affirmative vocalization we like to use in English - "mmm-hmmm" - Swedes show you they agree with you by a sharp intake of breath, as that red-haired Viking chick Gale Storm has noted.

The first time it happens is always a shock - you can't help wondering if the person who just sucked in some air could in fact be having a kind of minor heart attack. Or wondering if that person has some new tic you haven't seen before. Or even wondering if you are hearing things. Even after a couple of months hearing it, this Swedish idiosyncrasy remains disconcerting and distracting.

The question is, if you were really having a heart attack and breathing in sharp little gasps, would a Swede think that you were simply a terribly agreeable fellow?

The Swedish word for the day is ja. It means yes

- by Francis S.

There is no real equivalent to The Guardian in the U.S., or in Sweden for that matter. The Guardian satisfies my leftist news needs like no other newspaper. And it has a web log. Not only that, soon it will be publishing a story on web logs. But first it's published a list of recommended blogs. I was ever so pleased to be included.

Thanks, Guardian!

The Swedish phrase for the day is jag har inte fått så många hits förut. It means I've never gotten so many hits before.

- by Francis S.

So last night we went to the Swedish premiere of "Minority Report." We rarely go to these things, but this time the husband wanted to actually see the movie, and it sounded pretty interesting to me, plotwise.

So we stood in line behind a, er, television personality and then had to wait a bit to get in while the tabloids took pictures of her and her escort. And then of course we ran into all sorts of beautiful people inside: the husband's agent, an up-and-coming fashion photographer who lives across the street from us, a crazy model.

So we listened to Peter Stormare introducing the film fast and furiously in his sunglasses in the dark theater. And it was appropriate that he was there in person to present it, because he was the best part of the movie. And it turned out that it was also appropriate to see the movie in Sweden because there is a part that is actually in Swedish. An extremely bizarre part, which includes a nurse with a huge mole on her upper lip singing "Små grodorna." But she changes the words, which are in Swedish in the movie, singing: "small frogs, small frogs are funny to see. No eyes, no eyes, no tails have they..." (The real words are no ears, rather than no eyes.)

So the movie deteriorated significantly after this over-the-top Swedish interlude. Someone kept putting thicker and thicker coatings of vaseline on the lens (Tom Cruise isn't that old yet, is he?), which was very distracting. The ending about made me spit up. And the moral of the story beaten into us with brutal force was, uh - I don't know.

So the popcorn was pretty good.

The Swedish word for the day is besviken. I think this has been the word of the day before, but that's just too bad. It means disappointed.

- by Francis S.

My summer extra-intensive Swedish class began this morning at 8:30.

Just after the second break, the Chinese woman sitting next to me, Y., said to me that she assumed I lived with a Swedish girlfriend or wife. I told her, no, I live with a Swedish husband.

She was rather taken aback by this. After a brief look of astonishment and silence, she asked me why.

An odd question. I didn't really know how to answer, especially not in Swedish. I sputtered a bit. I suppose I should have said it was because I was in love. Instead, I launched into the story of how I met the husband. Y. recovered her aplomb, and politely asked a few questions. Me, I was a bit red in the face. I desperately wanted to act naturally and matter-of-factly, but I'd slipped a little on my statement and it took a little while to completely regain my composure.

I hate when I turn these things into a big deal, because it wasn't a big deal.

For Wednesday, we have to write an essay on why we are taking the class.

The Swedish word for the day is därför. It means because.

- by Francis S.

Last night we sat up late eating caviar on toast and drinking white wine. Swedes prefer löjrom - whitefish roe, the best coming from Kalix up in the north of Sweden - to Russian beluga caviar. Our neighbor L., the chef, had styled food for a shoot with various caviars and while she'd given away the expensive Russian stuff to the photographer, she had saved the löjrom for us to have together.

We got to talking about self actualization, as we seem always to do with L. and her boyfriend P.

"When I moved to New York," L. said, "I was a bitch and stupid. I was such a perfectionist." She had worked at a renowned restaurant in New York. "They prepped the food way ahead of time on the weekend, and I would come in and say it wasn't good enough and throw it away. And this was to people who'd been working there for three years."

She was all of 21 years old when she had arrived. She had argued with the chef, who is well-known in Sweden because of his restaurant in New York. She had argued with everyone, and no one liked her.

Now, at the ripe old age of 27, she's learned that she was crazy when she was 21.

"I was crazy," she said.

She believes that she had too many unresolved inner conflicts then.

She believes that one of the problems with the world is that people expend too much energy trying to change things they can't change instead of fixing things inside themselves. That they worry about the Palestinians getting a fair deal, or a man getting stoned to death in Nigeria, instead of making their beds in the morning.

The husband wasn't buying this because in fact I make our bed in the morning, not him.

I told L. that I kind of agree with her; and yet it's sometimes hard to say how far our responsibilities to others extend.

And then we ate strawberries, without sugar.

The Swedish word for the day is ansvarig. It means responsible.

- by Francis S.

In one breath I claim I belong to no culture, in the next breath I'm getting all hot and bothered about religion rearing its ugly head yet again in America: the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of government subsidies of private - mostly religious - schools in the form of vouchers for parents who send their children to such non-public schools.

Does anyone else find it ironic that the Supreme Court has just decided that a bunch of priests and nuns deserve government handouts to molest, oops, I meant teach our children?

The Swedish phrase for the day is nu kan vi få betala, tack. It means can we pay now, please.

- by Francis S.

I got those little-brother-left-for-Paris-yesterday blues.

The Swedish word for the day is bröllopsresa. It means honeymoon.

- by Francis S.

"How do you find it living here?" asked F., the freelance art director, as we sat at a table or under a tent or on a rock sometime during midsummer.

After three and a half years living in Stockholm, people still ask me whether I like it here in Sweden. I always answer with a yes. I like it because I'm happily married, no doubt. And I like it because I have an interesting job and a life of my own outside my marriage. These are probably the three biggest factors.

But I also like it because Swedish culture agrees with me, or rather I agree with Swedish culture. Which is not to say that I am really a part of the culture. I feel rather outside the culture, but not in a dismaying or alienated way; I'm just not a Swede, and never will be. In fact, I feel outside American culture as well by this point. I'm a man without a culture, but I think being a homosexualist rather prepares one for living outside a culture (regardless of whether one believes in a gay culture or not, the vast majority of gay people live much of their lives as outsiders in many key ways).

Being without a culture certainly allows me to be lazy - I don't feel I have enough of a toehold in the culture to be able to make accurate and fair judgments about political issues, for example, and so I'm not burdened with having to make the effort of finding out more or trying to change things one way or another, something I most definitely felt when I had a culture. It makes me sound like a bum, though, doesn't it?

So, how do l find it living here?

Well, it's like, uh, life. (Apologies to Lorrie Moore.)

The Swedish phrase for the day is svårt att säga. It means difficult to say.

- by Francis S.

On Sunday, we had paella at H.'s apartment out in Stocksund, a well-to-do suburb of Stockholm. Eating paella beside us was Sweden's answer to Barbara Walters - a bit more intellectual and far to the left of Barbara, she has interviewed everyone from Moamar Qaddafi to Leonard Cohen.

She had just gotten back from the States, where she was doing a story on Steve Lofton and Roger Croteau's fight to adopt their foster child, and a follow-up story to one she had done 11 years ago on a family of white supremacists in Georgia. Eleven years later, it had hardly changed.

"I think racism is getting worse," the Swedish Barbara Walters said.

I am an optimist on the issue of racism. I've always felt that, slowly but surely, two steps forward and one step back, we move in the right direction. Yes, it can be discouraging sometimes, with right-wing parties gaining a foothold in Europe because of their anti-immigrant stances. With the U.S. Department of Justice using the current climate of fear to do away with due process. And yet, we move forward, things are better than they were 20 years ago; it's just that positive change also brings out the worst in some people.

Am I wrong, is racism on the increase?

The Swedish phrase for the day is jag vet inte, faktiskt. It means, I don't know, actually.

- by Francis S.

Midsummer was what it was supposed to be: alternating downpour and sunshine, one meal ending only for another meal to start, endless conversations in English or Swedish or French about soccer and Palestinians and where to eat in Paris and how expensive it is to buy a flat in London. We even managed to learn and sing the chorus of a nonsense song in Bengali, which an Indian guest quite effectively made into a drinking song. (We couldn't come up with an appropriate American song - "A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall" just seemed a bit, well, long and puerile; at least the English and the Swiss who happened to be there failed to come up with English or Swiss drinking songs, so we weren't alone in our dereliction to sing.)

My beloved little brother earned his midsummer chops by standing in rain that was coming down like bolts of cloth unfurling, one in a group of four people soaked to the skin and desperately fastening birch boughs to the midsummer pole so that we could all dance around it later. Which we did, eight hours or so later, with great gusto and like little children.

I managed to scrape myself up good, stepping at 1:30 a.m. out from under the tent erected in the front yard of the farmhouse and sliding down a ditch and coming up the other end and smashing into the pavement. Oh the blood, oh my poor hands, oh my sore ribs.

The Swedish word for the day is fest. It means party.

- by Francis S.

The dog days of summer are here:

1. My friend K., who lives in Boston, has become a pawn of the puppy Internet trade. She is now the proud mother of an adopted baby boxer named Alice. There was a chubby little boy in all the pictures of Alice that K. had been sent beforehand, but interestingly enough he was not in the cage with Alice when she arrived. K. was relieved.

"I guess he could have slimmed down with a lot of games of fetch on the beach," K. said.

And, K. did an evil thing that I told her not to. She sent pictures of Alice to the husband's e-mail account. I told her that I would remove all traces if I found them, but I wasn't diligent enough.

"I want one," the husband said when he read the e-mail, his voice all dreamy and wistful and full of pleading.

Me, I was raised by parents who grew up on farms, parents who believe that animals have a job to do, and that job is outside, be it a cow, a pig, a dog or a cat. I like animals well enough, but I've managed to inherit my parents rather, er, distant love of animals. I am not big on the idea of having a boxer in an apartment in the city.

"Hee hee," K. giggled when I confronted her. "It's just a good thing that he can't see Alice in person, because believe me, she is so cute he would need psychiatric care."

2. My beloved little brother and his wife the Rebel arrived last night, 30 kilo suitcase in tow and bearing pictures of the wedding (I liked them so very much because I looked so nice and thin even though I'm not nice and thin. Oh, and everyone else looked pretty good, too, especially the very photogenic bride and groom.)

As we sat up late, drinking wine and sipping gazpacho, the Rebel told me about her friend Karen and Karen's girlfriend Susan.

"They love their dog," she said. "And now it looks like they're going to pay a big wad of money to have one of the dog's lungs removed. The dog looks just fine but apparently this is not so. One of my friends said 'that dog is circling the drain.'"

Circling the drain?

The Swedish word for the day, of course, is hunden. It means the dog.

- by Francis S.

On my way to pick up the husband from work, I passed through Humlegården - the bumblebee park - the park that surrounds the Royal Library. The park was filled with numerous groups of Swedes drinking beer and playing boule or kubb - an ingeniously simple game from the Swedish island of Gotland - under the trees.

All life has moved outdoors, and the nation can't decide whether or not to believe the weather forecasters who are predicting rain for Friday, which is midsommarafton - midsummer eve, arguably the most important holiday of the year.

My beloved little brother and his wife the Rebel will be arriving tomorrow night, and on Thursday we will make our way in the afternoon to Ornö, an island in the southern part of the Stockholm archipelago. Ornö is the site of the summer home of P. and E., the parents of the Swedish photographer who lives in London with his English wife.

P.'s grandfather was the schoolmaster on the island at the turn of the century, and P. still owns the farm that his grandparents bought in the twenties. There are three or four small houses on the land, and I think we'll be staying in the one that is haunted by the ghost of Mor Anna, who will only let you open the door to the house if she likes you. (She likes me, evidently, because I had no trouble opening the door when I was there last summer.)

P.'s grandparents moved up to Ornö from southern Sweden for some unknown reason; and sometime shortly after, the island became an arts colony of sorts - Strindberg lived there at some point in his life. The island has become more of a summer spot these days, although there is still a grevinna - countess - of the island, who can be seen buying ice cream in the small market down the road from the farm of P.'s grandparents.

As for midsummer, it will be a mix of some 25 English, Americans and Swedes, and I suppose that all who are familiar with the traditions of the holiday will have to do his or her part to train everyone else - the toasts, the singing of "små grodorna" and dancing around the majstång - maypole, the eating of herring, herring and more herring, the toasts, the wearing of midsummer wreaths, the OP and beskadroppar, the toasts, and the playing of games, for example.

So, what are we waiting for? Let's get on with it.

postscript: my friend A. tells me that the word for bumblebee is humla and not humle, which is hops. But bumblebees are so much more picturesque and appropriate for a park than hops are. I think I will start calling it Humlagården instead of Humlegården.

- by Francis S.

I don't do memes, not usually. I hate the word, it sounds so Doctor Who-ish.

But it seems that Nancy, über-dyke and proprietess of jillmatrix.com, is trying - god only knows why - to win this blogwhore contest. And, well, I'm a sucker for Nancy.

So, here goes. A meme for Nancy:

"Five things that pick me up when I'm feeling blue. Now, how 'bout you?"

1. Saffron ice cream from Gunnarson's konditori down the block.
2. "Nur Ein Wink vom Siene Hände" from Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium, sung in the crisp and clear voice of the late Arleen Auger.
3. A big sloppy kiss from the husband.
4. Re-reading "When I Was Thirteen" by Denton Welch.
5. A hot bath, a la Blanche Du Bois.

- by Francis S.

You'd think that being queer, I would escape seeing Sweden lose to Senegal in the latest round of the World Cup. But no, the husband roused us at 8:15 this morning to watch the match, and then M., the t.v. producer, came over during halftime and watched the rest of it with us.

Oh well. Senegal did play a tougher and tighter game. They certainly deserved to win.

I hope I haven't just jeopardized my future chances at dual U.S.-Swedish citizenship.

The Swedish word for the day is förlorare. It means loser.

- by Francis S.

In Europe, men wear perfume. Or in Stockholm at least. It's not considered a great big homo thing here. Plus, there don't seem to be any people in Sweden who find perfume abhorrant, demanding fragrance free zones, and suing people for wearing too much Eau de Love.

I never used to wear perfume in the States, but now it's Issey Miyake for me. The husband wears Bulgari.

The Swedish verb for the day is att dofta. It means to smell, and in a sweet way.

- by Francis S.