The evening started in L.'s apartment with a mojito - the husband and A., the assistant producer and C., the fashion photographer, and R., the r&b star, and L.'s boyfriend, and me.

It was a dinner of lamb with prunes, and couscous, and blood oranges, and almonds. And then there was lots of red wine, and everyone talking at once, agreeing and disagreeing about exactly how much manic despression is due to chemistry and how much it is due to sociology, about overpopulation and personal responsibility and sorting one's trash for recycling, about Michael Jackson and his ability or inability to influence the media, and we went round the table and gave out our middle names, those of us who have them.

"I have a great story," A., the assistant director said. "You know the actress is still playing the maid in A Doll's House. Well, the other day, during the performance while the lead actors were in the middle of their dialogue, a mobile phone rang in the audience and the guy actually answered it and everyone could hear him say: 'I'm at the theater. Mmm-hmmm. So-so...' It was all they could do not to burst out laughing, they just had to keep on playing . But afterwards, the whole cast laughed their heads off."

It's great to know that actors have a sense of humor about this kind of thing.

The Swedish verb for the day is att bli. It's a verb that doesn't translate so easily - it means to be or to become, and I misuse it often, as it's used when a change of condition is implied as far as I can tell. Att vara means to be when no change of condition is implied. I suppose there's some kind of rule about when to use which form, but mostly I learn it by listening.

- by Francis S.

From: "Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer"  
| This is Spam | Add to Address Book
To: francisxstrand@yahoo.com
Subject: Hola Francis XXX Strand
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 22:39:58 +0100 (CET)

Hi Francis.

I love your page, I love what you write, I love you! Sorry, but thats
the truth. I am a nice guy from Albania, Tirana that couldnt help myself
from becoming obsessed with you and your website. I have to admit that
I actually went to Sweden to try to find you, not much luck.
I am in Sweden again now to star in a couple of arty
flicks. Yes I am a gay porn star, but everything I do have to have some
deeper spiritual meaning and a lot of subtext going on, I cant stand
does superficial flicks were they just f^^^ and suck, I think sex, poetry
and something to say about life is the best ingrediences for a
successfull gay flick. Dont you agree? We are starting the shoot off the first
flick at the end of next week "A fluffers confession" then two days
later we will shoot "Being Johns Malcockwitch" followed by "Bed man
walking". All three flicks are intellectual masterpieces, very well wri
tten and with something deep and profound to say about life and the
society we are living in. The intellectual viewpoints that inspired the
creation of these flicks are based upon the philosophy by Aristotle,
Karl Marx, Jesus and Jeff Koons. Yes, you have guessed it, I am a
co-writer:)What I wanted to ask you was if you would like to star in one of the
flicks. I was on my way to approach you yesterday when I was waiting
outside your office, but I thought you might get upset if I
didnt contact you before approaching you. I have stared in a flick called
"Stalking Johnny Depp", it was based on a real stalking scenario and I
learned that it wasnt a very good idea. I will come by your office
monday and maybe you can show me around stockholm and we can have lunch. I
am quite tall, I wear blue leather pants and I have a large beard. My
name is Genc Xhelaj, you can search google and find some interesting
information about me and my life.

Kisses & Hugs.

Genc Xhelaj.

Oh, M., my favorite movie producer.

I guess someone isn't keeping you busy enough in London.

The Swedish phrase for the day is att smeka, which means to caress or fondle.

- by Francis S.

It was about as fat a Tuesday as I could handle. I'm too old for Mardi Gras or Carnival, it seems, but not too old for Sweden's version of the holiday: one simply stuffs oneself with semlor, sweet buns filled with almond paste and rich cream. Which we did with A., the assistant director and C., the fashion photographer at their apartment last night. It's the one place that feels as much like home as home.

Now it's time for forty days of dourness and denial.

The Swedish word for the day is fastan. It means Lent.

- by Francis S.

I've never had to commute to work before, I've always lived a 20-minute walk from whatever office I was working at. Until now.

I'm having to re-think my love of trains. And I'm wondering why anyone would ever live farther than a 20-minute walk from work, because the years of a lifetime spent commuting are the equivalent to years spent in hell. At least if the subway is crowded. Otherwise it's a kind of vaguely malign purgatory. I can't begin to imagine what it must be like to drive every day, sitting in traffic with no escape.

Maybe it's time for the husband and I to move.

I know, I'm a spoiled brat.

The Swedish word for the day is att skjutsa. It means to give a ride to.

- by Francis S.

Poor February.

When Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar and freed it from the lunar cycle, he made the months 30 or 31 days long. But there weren't enough left to give the final month of the Roman year, February, its full due and it got only 29. Later, the 30-day month of Sextillus was renamed for Augustus Caesar and became August, but in order for it to equal the splendor of Julius Caesar's month of July with its 31 days, a day was stolen from February to make up the difference, leaving it with only 28 (most of the time). I'm fascinated at how we're still ruled by the Romans.

Poor February.

The Swedish phrase for the day is ingen orsak. It means no big deal.

- by Francis S.

As I stood on the subway platform at 8:15 p.m., changing trains at Slussen, I looked up and standing in front of me was a charming man with green eyes, dark and unshaven and smiling. It was the husband, who had been on the same train as I, two cars ahead.

Funny how this small surprise was like a gift out of the blue. We left the subway at Medborgarplatsen and had dinner at Indira, which I like to think of as the McDonald's of the Farmer Street, where we live.

It was just like a date.

The Swedish verb for the day is att ropa. It means to yell.

- by Francis S.

Lord knows I'll regret noting this, but there's a web poll currently up at the website of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest daily newspaper, where it appears that 59 percent of those polled believe that the United States is the biggest threat to freedom in the world. Iraq comes in at 18 percent, and North Korea at 15 percent.

I guess George W. doesn't care what a little country like Sweden thinks.

I wonder how the English or the French or the Germans or Australians or Thais or South Africans or Peruvians would respond to such a poll?

The Swedish phrase for the day is det beror på.... It means that depends on....

- by Francis S.

We went with C., the fashion photographer and R., the R&B star, to see Far from Heaven, with which we were all duly impressed. The conceit of producing a 1950s film with characters forced to deal with situations that were unfilmable 50 years ago was overwhelming. All those perfect red leaves and perfect red "New Look" dresses, all that repressed emotion.

Afterwards, we watched the semifinals for Sweden's competition to select its entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, a strange phenomenon that I couldn't begin to describe to Americans, who are for the most part completely unaware of its existence. Cheesy pop music at its worst - uh, I mean, best.

I still can't decide if the juxtaposition of the two events was ironic or not.

The second Swedish word for the day is schlager. It is the kind of music sung by Sweden's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest.

- by Francis S.

One of the great strengths of American culture is its optimism. Americans are, as a whole, inclined to look on the bright side of things. Unfortunately, Swedes could never be accused of such a trait. Even the language tends toward the negative - things are "not too bad" rather than "good."

Being an optimistic American, sometimes the constant looking at what has gone wrong and what could go wrong here can make me crazy.

It was a hard week at work, for some reason. I'm not looking forward to going into the office at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

The Swedish verb for the day is att våga. It means to dare.

- by Francis S.

A bunch of Swedish guys, led by Torgny Bjers, are rapidly creating a web community for Swedish bloggers (in Swedish only, of course). It's fascinating to watch it develop. If only I knew more about RSS feeds and pinging and trackback functions...

- by Francis S.

As I lean out the kitchen window, cigarette in hand, worried that if I lean too hard on the window sash it will somehow give way and I'll fall, the blue-black night sky turns the courtyard into a place of romance. During the day, it's all scraggly bushes, lonely bicycles and trash cans. But at night, the lights in the windows of the buildings surrounding the courtyard, and the silhouettes of the various cupolas and mansards and odd corners and chimney pots of the roofs charm me into thinking, ever so briefly, that I'm living in a fairy tale, and I stop worrying about falling.

The Swedish phrase for the day is stor skillnad. It means big difference.

- by Francis S.

On Saturday, the husband was the emcee for a big fashion event, and I watched him preside over the evening while I sat safely in my anonymous seat amongst 800 other people, eating risotto and drinking champagne and watching models careening up and down a runway, worried that they would trip over their impossibly high heels on account of their hair was in their eyes and they were trying so hard to look cool.

As the night wore on and more beautiful women catwalked their way in front of us, I pointed at a model and whispered to A., the assistant director, that I thought this particular model was sexy.

"Ew, no, she's not," A. said with horror.

Yeah, but look at those pouty lips, and they're real, too, I said.

"Ew. Ew!"

Yeah, right. Both of us are real experts on sexy women, I whispered to A., and she laughed out loud.

The husband, who had never done this kind of emcee thing before, was brilliant.

The Swedish word for the day is uppfattning. It means understanding or apprehension.

- by Francis S.

I'm no supporter of the U.S.'s bullying the rest of the world, or a war on Iraq, or George W. Bush, who inspires a visceral disgust in me - his voice alone sets my teeth on edge.

So I suppose I should be at Norra Bantorget right now, where stands Stockholm's contingent of the world protesting today against the undoubtedly soon-to-be-declared official war, a protest that is as much about Iraq as it is about the U.S. imposing its will on the rest of the world, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks or feels. And if I were living in America, I would be out there protesting somewhere.

But living here, it feels as if it would be disloyal, no matter how much I disagree with current U.S. policies. I guess I'm more patriotic than I ever dreamed I was, but I wonder if this is actually some form of cowardice, an unwillingness to act on my beliefs. I am, in fact, utterly confused by it.

The Swedish word of the day is mot. It is a preposition that means, among other things, against.

- by Francis S.

Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offence. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over other men’s sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance.

I Corinthians 13, v. 4-7

Yeah, yeah, it's the Bible, I know. But it's still the best description of love that I can think of.

The Swedish word of the day is, of course, kärlek, which has assuredly been the Swedish word of the day before. It means love.

- by Francis S.

What with all the war talk from George W. and nasty rhetoric about Europe being a continent of terrorism aiders and abettors, I thought I better get my Swedish citizenship application in. Not that I have to give up my U.S. citizenship, but as long as I'm here, and all it takes is filling out a four-page form, and paying 150 dollars, why not avail myself of the opportunity? Somehow, I would rest easier at night knowing I had a Swedish passport.

The Swedish word for the day is försäkring. It means insurance.

- by Francis S.

If you squint hard, and ignore all the heavy clothes you and everyone else are wearing, and the boots, and the fact that it's freezing out, trudging through the snow of an unshoveled sidewalk can almost seem like walking on a sandy beach. Or so says the South African publicist.

The Swedish word for the day is slask. It means slush, and should not be confused with the word slusk, which means a shabby fellow.

- by Francis S.

... and another great thing about Sweden: Where else could you watch a mainstream movie in which the (young and attractive) star spends half of the movie completely and utterly naked, balls to the wind? (Granted, the movie is a ripoff of Groundhog Day, after a fashion, and the acting is pretty mediocre, but hey, you can't have everything). I can't believe the husband and I didn't bother to watch this movie until long after it came out on DVD.

The question is, would this movie be rated X in the States because of the dick factor?

The Swedish word for the day is muskelknuttar, a word I had to look up in my English-Swedish dictionary because I have never heard anyone use it before. It means beefcake, although I suspect that many Swedes might actually be more likely to use the English term.

- by Francis S.

Cold-hearted bastard that I am, some events fail to move me, yet there have been moments that have changed the course of my personal history, purely due to their affect on me.

Like the time I was five, and I happened upon an art book on Michelangelo - looking at a photograph of the famous statue of David, I wanted to be David and to have David at the same time, and it made me feel all torn up inside in the most delightful way: I discovered my sexual self, and I felt in my heart that it was good.

It's not true that small children are not sexual beings, which is not to say that pedophilia isn't an awful thing.

The Swedish word for the day is känslig. It means sensitive.

- by Francis S.

Personal tics can drive a person crazy. Or they can be endearing.

I love how the husband delicately touches the tip of his right index finger to his tongue before he turns each page of, say, a script. He looks like a librarian.

I've thought of getting him a rubber fingertip, the color and texture of the balls we used on the playground when I was in the third grade.

The Swedish word for the day is spex, a longstanding personal request by Linnéa, one of two Swedish librarians with wonderful weblogs (the other is Erik). There is no neat and clean one-word translation, unfortunately - my big Norstedt's Swedish-English dictionary defines it as a student farce or burlesque - it is surely the equivalent of Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club nonsense.

- by Francis S.

B. 1918, D. 2003.

Yugoslavia is no more.

It was a difficult life.

The Swedish word for the day is onda. It means pain.

- by Francis S.

Cities without trees are just awful. Some of the most impressive streets I know - Las Ramblas in Barcelona or the Champs Elysées in Paris, for example - are aesthetically pleasing in large part because of their trees. Stockholm is surrounded by green, but the streets are generally not tree-lined, as a rule. Still, there are wonderful exceptions, such as Karlaplan, one of the spots I hit as I make my home from the office each day, or Katarina Bangata, just behind our apartment.

Trees without cities, however, are the happiest trees. It's awful that city trees suffer so much. But, being the cold heartless bastard that I am, my pity is not great enough that I think trees should not make the sacrifice. The problem is that there just aren't enough trees making the sacrifice.

Then again, some people might argue that we should try and make cities healthier for trees - and, uh, people.

The Swedish word for the day is trädgårdssax. It means pruning shears.

- by Francis S.

The boy lay on his back on the hood of the little car, his feet in their immaculate tennis shoes just barely touching the ground, a carefully folded two-thousand peseta note clutched in his hand.

He was alive, yes, they could see that. His chest, his very narrow chest was pulling his very narrow belly with it, up and down and up and down they went, so very deeply, he was certainly breathing. But such a deep, narcotic sleep, he couldn't be roused, not with first a voice in the ear, then a poke with the rolled up flyer from the movie they'd just seen up in Gracia. Not even with a gentle slapping of the cheek and finally, with slaps one could hear had force.

He just lay on the hood in curiously natural fashion, as if he were a small child left to nap by parents who were surely close by. It reminded Francis somehow of when his nephew had been little more than a baby, and in the midst of a noisy party, wide awake and smiling, he had been placed on the edge of the sofa to have his shoes changed. In the exact instant of being placed on the sofa, he had fallen deeply asleep, still sitting up. It was so sudden and so profound, so transitionless, Francis had laughed.

The boy on the hood slept like that, as if he didn't quite understand the difference between waking and sleeping, or when or how to do or not do one or the other.

And yet the position was of course most unnatural, surely terribly uncomfortable at the least. He had no needle marks on his arms, his skin was unmarred and pale under the streetlights, so they couldn't know what powerful magic pinned him to the hood of the car, pills or alcohol or another thing altogether. Poor Prometheus, poor St. Sebastian, Francis thought. Something had to be done.

It was Edu who went to look for a payphone to call an ambulance, while Francis stood and watched the boy.

Francis looked at the angular little face, the thin nose rising in the center to a perfect peak, the perfect peak one sees only in dreams, the perfect, symmetric and unreal mountain one draws as a child. His mouth below was narrow, his eyelids above were a pair of hyphens, precise and basic, nothing more than what they absolutely had to be. Thick veins curled and twisted round his arms, the backs of his hands. And his skin -- on his arms, his neck, his face -- was waxen, streetlit purity.

Then there were those tennis shoes. Not new, but kept as if they were, those shoes were so well-tended, there was such a pride apparent in the clean white of them. The shoes gave Francis reassurance -- false, he knew -- that the boy would be all right, they seemed a charm against all the worst possiblities.

Edu returned. The ambulance was on its way, he said. And as soon as he said this, they saw the flash of blue lights.

"So fast!" Edu said. "I can't believe it." Edu was relieved, Francis could see the tension in his face change direction with the shifting of responsibility.

But Francis was not relieved, he was frightened suddenly, the calm of the night broken because the ambulance had come to save the boy who lay so quietly on the hood of the car. Mortality had arrived: a pulse would be taken, needles appear, nameless medical instruments pulled from a bag and used somehow, there would be retching and blood, seizures and violence. He didn't want to see it. The talismanic shoes were no use now.

"What do we have here," the medic said matter of factly, it wasn't a question because she could see well enough. She checked the boy's arms as Edu and Francis had done earlier.

"I don't think there are any needle marks," Edu said.

She tried to rouse the boy, as Edu and Francis had done earlier, but he didn't wake for her either. She took his pulse, and Francis began to feel sick. Behind her, the other medic was tearing into a paper packet, pulling out something small and sharp and antiseptic. They opened the boy's mouth and inserted a strange plastic tube, short, shaped like an apostrophe. Francis felt a breathlessness, a queasiness, and he knew if he wasn't careful, he could faint. Take in air, breathe deeply, he said to himself, as if he rather than the boy were on the hood of the car.

Then the boy jerked awake reflexively, knocking the tube out of his mouth, and suddenly he was standing unsteadily beside the car, his eyes as black and dead and unseeing as spots of ink. There was no retching, no seizure, no blood, but still Francis felt sick, sicker even. The beauty bestowed by that terrible sleep had been replaced with stuporous, incoherent and squinting ugliness. But the boy was alive, standing even, unable to answer the medic -- "Where were you going?" "What did you take, pills or only drink?" "Don't worry, it's okay, you aren't in trouble, we're here to help you" -- but able at least to give her his hand so she could prick a finger for blood.

Francis walked away, sitting on a marble stoop some twenty feet from the group round the boy who had lain on the hood of the car. He lowered his head briefly, and the faintness left him, the nausea, the sweat on the palms of his hands.

After a moment, Edu broke away and came toward him. Francis stood up, collected, ready to walk the remaining blocks to the apartment -- it wasn't far, not really.

"I heard the medic say it was .89 blood alcohol," he told Francis. "That's very high, no?"

Yes, it was impossibly high.

"Do you think," Francis asked, "that could kill you?"

"I don't know, maybe," Edu said.

"I think," Francis said, feeling in his pocket for change, a cigarette, a stick of chewing gum, anything at all, "I think it could."

from a 1998 Barcelona diary




The Swedish word for the day is b-moll. It means B flat minor.

- by Francis S.

I remember the first time the space shuttle exploded in mid-air, I would've been about 25 years old. I suppose it was sad, although to be honest it had little impact on me. Some ten years later, I overheard some college students talking with each other about the event, which was seminal for them, not unlike the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy for people who are half a generation older than I am.

In my life, there are no seminal events like that. I remember all kinds of things - not being able to go into Detroit for a fieldtrip to Greenfield Village in 1968 because there were riots on account of Martin Luther King, Jr. having been murdered; riding back from a trip to Iowa to see my grandparents in 1969 and looking up at the moon and knowing there were men up there; Nixon resigning on television in 1975 (I still can't believe that he came a long way toward rehabilitating his image before he died); walking out of a linguistics class in 1981 in Urbana, Illinois and learning that Reagan had been shot and worrying that George Bush would be an even worse president (how innocent we were!).

But none of these events seem to have touched me, or changed me, or been imprinted indelibly either wonderfully or horribly onto my memory. I'm left cold by them, and it makes me cringe a bit to hear the latest victims of the shuttle accident described as heroes: A hero is, in the simplest terms, someone who risks his or her life to save someone elses'. Dramatic destruction so easily elicits hyperbole.

Am I a cold heartless bastard?

The Swedish phrase for the day is allt eller inget. It means all or nothing.

by Francis S.

These awards should prove to be far more interesting than the Bloggies. (Thanks for the link, which comes courtesy of my favorite pornstar shouldbe, Jonno, who is plugging himself for these awards but, hell, why not? He's got my vote!) I hope the awards ceremony will be webcast.

The Swedish word for the day is saftig. It means juicy.

- by Francis S.

Sweden's indiginous northern population - the Sami, commonly called Laplanders in English - speak a language, Sami, which is a bit unlike the other official minority languages of Sweden (Finnish, Romany Chib, Meänkieli, and Yiddish).

Shakespeare's Hamlet has been translated into Sami. It can be seen at the theater next to the Ice Hotel, up at Jukkasjärvi. I wonder what it could possibly sound like?

The Swedish phrase for the day is att vara eller inte vara. It means to be or not to be.

- by Francis S.

On the one hand, it's so easy being an expatriate because I don't need to have an opinion about politics: I can't properly keep up with what's going on in the States, and the Swedish system is impenetrable. Without the requisite nuances, I can't make a proper decision, so I just sort of slide by without choosing sides.

On the other hand, it's awful as an expatriate to have to constantly explain to dismayed Swedes the actions of the American government.

No matter what the leaders of the various governments of Europe say or do, the fact is that the European people, by and large, are wondering what the hell George W. Bush thinks he is doing and why there is no opposition from the American public.

The Swedish word for the day is skeptisk. It means, of course, skeptical.

- by Francis S.

Sweden is really hard on one's liver. Because, of course, any decent social gathering involves consuming mass quantities of alcohol. I remember my first office party in Stockholm, being taken aback that not only was it acceptable to get shitfaced, it was required. And since everyone gets completely bombed, from the CEO down to the little old lady who works in accounting and never says a word to anyone, there's no need to be worried about any embarrassing acts that may have been committed over the course of an evening or a weekend-long retreat. Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty, so it all equals out in the end.

For a foreigner, (uh, except if you're Finnish or Russian) the most difficult thing to remember is that you are a pathetic lightweight in comparison, so don't bother trying to keep up with the Swedes. Worse, everyone will be on time for work the next morning no matter how hungover they are, so don't even think about sleeping it off.

I'm still recovering from last night's drink with a former co-worker who was laid off in December. I helped her find a new job, and we celebrated at WC, our neighborhood bar. There are few things worse than riding the subway in the morning with a hangover, no matter how minor it is.

I made it in by 9:05.

The Swedish word for the day is färdig. It means finished.

- by Francis S.

Top-notch investigative blogging reveals questionable behavior by some Bloggies judges. Oh, the juicy anecdotes and salient detail, not to mention actual photos of alleged culprits.

Am I rescinding my nomination? Not on your life!

Think of what we could do if we focused our energies on something, um, important.

The Swedish word for the day is syrlig. It means acerbic, alias my competitor, which would be, uh, min konkurrent in Swedish. Are you confused now?

- by Francis S.

For Philo, who says I have been derelict in one aspect of my Swedish lessons: Swedes are not so big on swearing - most of their oaths are rather mild, and nearly all of them seem to involve the devil somehow. My favorite is fan också! It means devil, too!

Aren't Swedes just the cutest things?

- by Francis S.

This damned nomination is making me a bit crazy, sitting just behind my chair where I can't see it and staring at the back of my head, snickering under its breath and casting voodoo spells. I'm trying to ignore it, but I can't, so I may as well acknowledge it and mention at least two people - Tinka and Mig - who should be on that list in my place. They're my writing idols. Not to mention any number of people on the links at left, too many to list. So go, read what they have to say.

The Swedish word for the day is självklart. It means obviously.

- by Francis S.

Have you ever played 1000 blank white cards? When I first read about it, I knew it was a game for me. So, I made everyone play it on New Year's Eve. Me, the American editor, the guy from the Goethe Institute, the South African publicist and 20 Swedes.

The basic rule of the game is that there are no rules. You get blank cards, you write what you want on them. Like for instance:

Obsessed with elves - at least you're not a plushie. Minus 100 points
It's pleather - plus 200 points
Traffic jam - everyone hit the person on their left.
Traytables in their full upright and locked positions - minus 100 points if you're allergic to nuts.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - pinch yourself for 500 points.
Subscription to Playboy - but you read it for the high-quality writing. Minus 500 points.
Morning woody - plus 200 points all men. Women discard a card and draw a new one.
Nose candy - Everyone stick their little finger up their noses. Plus 500 to the deepest nostril.
Old fudge - Do you dare to eat it? It's a month and a half old... all players stand together in the bathroom.

The playing took a strange turn when the actress, who had been extremely drunk already when she had arrived at the party, got a little too enthusiastic when someone played the card that read Strip mall - everyone take off an article of clothing.

The Swedish word for the day is kortspelare. It means cardplayer.

- by Francis S.

When I was a kid, my father had rather peculiar tastes for someone of his background (an Iowa farmer's son) and education (an electrical engineer). He introduced us to "Monty Python's Flying Circus" when I was 13, and was addicted to the original bizarre night-time soap opera black comedy: "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman."

My father also loved Ingmar Bergman films, something my brothers and I never took to. Since then, I've learned to appreciate Bergman, although I couldn't go so far as to say I've enjoyed watching Cries and Whispers and Persona and Fanny and Alexander, but I know in my bones that he's about as good as it gets.

Now, here I am living in Sweden and I can, more or less, understand Swedish and if I wanted, I could go see one of the great plays of modern times as directed by one of the greatest directors of our age in a grand theater. Which I did last night, with the husband, and A., the assistant director, and her fiancé C., the fashion photographer, and P. and E., the parents of the friends from London - a complicated bunch of initials, but a choice bunch in real life, every last one of them. It was our treat, a present. My father will be so jealous when I tell him.

The play was superb - a straightforward staging without gimmicks, meaning that the actors must carry it off themselves through brute strength of will, which they did, unmannered and thoughtful and grand.

As I've gotten old, I weep so easily at movies. And at the end of plays, apparently. How embarrassing.

The second Swedish word for the day is gengångare, which was translated as ghosts in the original translation of Ibsen's play. However, it is apparently very inexact, and there doesn't seem to be a good English word for someone-who-haunts-you, which is what everyone seemed to agree that gengångare means.

- by Francis S.

Holy mother of god, father of god, little brother of god and second cousin once-removed of god. I guess people do want to learn Swedish the hard way: This site was nominated for "Best European Blog" in the Bloggies 2003.

The Swedish word for the day is skitbra. It means shit-good, in the best possible way.

- by Francis S., almost in too much shock to thank everyone

I'm a coward, and I'm lazy. Oh, and I'm jealous, too, because heterosexualists have it so easy when it comes to kissing. It becomes such a production if I want to kiss my husband in public, or hold hands with him. It's instantly a statement to everyone in the vicinity, and I don't want to make a statement to anyone but him. Yet I know it will never change if homosexualists like myself don't bother to kiss each other in public precisely because it is a statement.

I'm just a coward, and lazy and I think the whole thing kind of stinks.

On the other hand, at least I'm not likely to end up in prison anymore just for my homosexualist tendencies. That is, if I stay out of Texas.

The Swedish words for the day are skratt and gråt. They mean laugh and cry.

- by Francis S.

I live in a social world full of photographers and popstars and football players and television personalities and stage actors and ballet dancers and more than an average share of ex-models. All of them with a modicum of fame here in tiny Sweden.

Yet, I was still surprised to find that my friend, I., one of the aforementioned ex-models, toured for four months in 1998, singing with David Byrne.

I loved the Talking Heads in the late '70s and '80s - I know most of their songs, owned most of their albums back when vinyl was pretty much the only choice. They are the only rock group I ever listened to over a long period of time with anything close to fervor. I thought they were the shit. Still do, sort of, as far as rock and roll and shit goes.

So, the important question was, was David Byrne an asshole?

I., the ex-model, answered: "What do you think?"

The Swedish word for the day is speciell. It means special in the same way the English word is used, although it is used most often to describe someone who is difficult, strange, unpleasant to deal with.

- by Francis S.

Last night, we went and saw Gangs of New York, which is apparently un-American, perhaps because it is about not guns, but knives. Knives and Daniel Day-Lewis chewing up enough scenery to cover his lifetime roughage needs. Still, I'd take it over The Patriot any day.

A., the assistant director, brought along her great aunt who lives in the far north of Sweden and who hadn't seen a movie in 50 years.

It wasn't, in hindsight, perhaps the best movie to see after 50 years of non-movie going. The great aunt seemed to be in shock at the end of the movie. "Next time," A. said, "it should be a romantic comedy."

Some solace.

The Swedish word for the day is blodig. It means bloody.

- by Francis S.

When the weather is cold, Swedes walk on the ice. It's like a scene out of Brueghel, sledders and skaters and skiers slipping and sliding and promenading, the steeples and towers of the city on the palisades of Lake Mälaren above and around them.

Me, I've taken a walk on the ice exactly once. And that was on a very shallow lake outside the city. I decided that I'm not so keen on any kind of exercise that requires a weird plastic necklace with detachable wooden handles that end in metal spikes that can quickly be whipped free and stabbed into the ice so one can pull oneself out of the freezing water. Swedes apparently learn how to use these things - called isdubbar - when they're in school, sort of like we had to learn lifesaving techniques in swimming class in high school. Somehow, having that thing around my neck takes away the feeling of calm that walking on the ice is supposed to give one.

Meanwhile, in South Africa, the husband arrived at his hotel only to find that someone had stolen the underwear out of his baggage while it was, uh, being handled. I wonder if the person who stole the underwear was disappointed that it was clean.

The Swedish word for the day is tjuv. It means thief.

- by Francis S.

Last year, being relatively new to the blogosphere, and full of opinion and bite, I followed rather closely those awards known as the Bloggies and in response made my own awards - the My Way awards - with winners in categories such as Best Sylvia Plath impersonator, Best Potential Pornstar, Best i-Mom, Weakest Link, Best-in-Show, that kind of thing.

This year, I haven't been paying enough attention to make my own awards, let alone notice the Bloggies - but Jessica has. She made a list of recommended nominations for the Bloggies. And graciously, she nominated "How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons" in the Best European Blog category, among many other suggestions (including Miguel, whom I then went and voted for in several categories, along with voting for a number of other favorites on the links to the left).

The Swedish phrase for the day is tack ska du ha. It means, literally, thanks shall you have - I suppose a more useful translation might be thanks ever so kindly.

- by Francis S.

The Baltic is frozen to the edges of the Stockholm archipelago, and the sun has finally made it over the horizon for the first time in a month in the northern Swedish city of Kiruna. But the husband has momentarily abandoned the winter for sun and heat. He is, as I write this, on his way to South Africa to film a music video involving a rabbitman and a band playing on the flatbed railroad car of a train careening through the countryside of South Africa.

The South African publicist and his husband, the guy from the Goethe Institute, were terribly jealous when the husband told them earlier in the week. They'd stopped by to pick up shoes that they'd left behind at the New Year's party and brought sherry, which we sat sipping in what was nearly a caricature of civilized fashion.

"Did you have fun at the party?" the husband asked. They had hardly known anyone but us.

"Yes, we had fun," said the South African publicist, despite his having to perform his usual party trick of speaking Xhosa, with its clicks and stops. "But stop trying to change the subject. I can't believe you're going to South Africa. Don't you need an assistant?"

Unfortunately, my husband did not need an assistant.

The Swedish word for the day is resenär. It means traveller.

- by Francis S.

Who says that consumers want mobile phones (sorry, link in Swedish only and even worse, no pictures) only for talking?

Some people obviously like to use the take-a-picture functions available on the latest models. Like the guy who bought a phone here in Sweden and found it pre-loaded with pictures that hadn't been removed when it had been returned by its previous owner. Strangely enough, the pictures were of the previous owner's dick.

Sadly, I don't think this is going to happen to me when I get a phone to replace the one that died over the holidays.

The Swedish word for the day is, uh, kuk, which is pronounced sort of like "cuke" and means cock, and should not be confused with kock, which is pronounced sort of like "kook" and means cook or chef.

- by Francis S.

Sweden is Babyland.

Yeah, people are, arguably, babied a bit by the government, which many Swedes will readily tell you (a big controversy at the moment are the high numbers of people on, er, "disability" - sjukskriven they call it - because their doctors have written them notes to bring to their bosses saying they have a tummyache and it's going to last two months so they have to stay home and drink flat gingerale. Or something like that.)

But I was thinking of Sweden as Babyland more because there seems to be a baby boom going on. The government encourages babying on many levels, apparently. For instance, parents get some $100 per month per child from the government to cover the cost of raising a child. Parents also get nearly a year and a half of parental leave when a child is born, to be divided as they wish, much of that time at 80 percent pay. There is special sick leave when a parent must stay home to take care of a child, and there is universal daycare. The country is a veritable Parentopia.

I want to have a child.

(I think the fact that all my friends are having babies is having an effect on me. After all, who could resist the charms of, say, Hannes Pakarinen, who on New Year's played the part of The Perfect Baby - those cheeks! that nose! those little rabbit booties!)

Am I crazy?

The Swedish phrase for the day is vad har hänt? It means what has happened?

by Francis S.

The American editor and his wife left this morning, piling bag after bag into the cab as if they were fleeing the country. The apartment is empty and a little cold in the pale January light. Oh, the dinners and parties and games and movies and conversations and more conversations of the past three weeks - I've been so busy living, I haven't had the time to write about it.

The Swedish phrase for the day is på grund av, often shortened to the acronym p g a. It means on account of.

by Francis S.

I've made it three-quarters of the way through to the twelfth day of Christmas, which is an amazing feat. The season has been unduly full of cookie baking, concert singing, movie going, IKEA shopping, American Christmas dinner for 15 Swedes fixing, and then guests, guests and more guests, including my sister-in-law, the rebel, who was here for 18 hours before she whizzed off back to the States at 9 a.m. on Dec. 31.

Then there was that New Year's party we gave. At 8:00 a.m., instead of leaving, the last guests were given sheets and pillows to sleep on the sofas in the living room.

Someone left his or her digital camera complete with, er, interesting pictures of the football player in what could be described as an unusual yoga position. The photos could no doubt have been sold to Hänt Extra, Sweden's smarmy equivalent to The National Enquirer, for good money.

It's been a day and a half and I still feel like I could sleep for a week. But that's the mark of a good party, isn't it?

The Swedish word for the day is januari, which you don't need me to tell you means January.

by Francis S.

Wolcum be thou hevené king,
Wolcum Yole!
Wolcum, born in one morning,
Wolcum for whom wesall sing!

Wolcum be ye Stevene and Jon,
Wolcum innocentes every one,
Wolcum Thomas marter one.

Wolcum be ye good Newe Yere,
Wolcum, Twelfthe Day both in fere,
Wolcum, seintes lefe and dere,

Wolcum Yole!

Candelmesse, Quene of bliss,
Wolcum bothe to more and lesse.

Wolcum be ye that are here,
Wolcum, wolcum, make good cheer.
Wolcum alle another yere.
Wolcum!

anonymous; 14th century

The Swedish phrase for the day is god jul. It means Merry Christmas.

- by Francis S.

M., the t.v. producer, is back from London. It felt, as we lolled about on the sofas in the living room, he with his usual whiskey glass of white tequila, neat, as if he'd never left. But he's only back for the holidays, but back full of stories and snickering.

He's sharing a flat in Notting Hill with the brother of E., the friend in London. It apparently took some doing to get the flat.

"They won't rent to two straight guys," he told us. "You have to be a couple." Apparently, it took several, uh, incidents wherein real estate agents were happily showing the two of them flats until the agents realized that they were a couple of grubby hets who didn't give a flying fuck about order and cleanliness, at which point the agents clucked their tongues and told them "sorry, homosexualists only need apply."

M. then tried to convince E.'s brother that they had to start lying to the agents, saying they were big-time homos and ever-so-much in love. But E.'s brother didn't want to say that he was gay. At this point, M. noted that the story would be better if it were true that E.'s brother had internal conflicts and couldn't bring himself to say that he was a big-time homo to anyone; the truth is that E.'s brother thought it ridiculous that real estate agents would rent out only to homosexualists and he was unwilling to lie. M. persisted and coaxed and cajoled, however, and finally E.'s brother gave in and promised he would lie.

The day came when they saw an appealing flat advertised in the window of a real estate agent, and they went in and were told they would have to go look at the flat immediately. They jumped in the car with the agent, but the timing wasn't great because M. was supposed to be in a phone conference with all these various executive types in Sweden and the U.K. and the States. The agent didn't mind, and M. sat in the back seat doing business while E.'s brother sat in the front seat with the agent, who had just started out in her job.

"So," she said to E.'s brother. "How long have you two been together?"

M., who was supposed to be paying attention to his phone conference, was suddenly all ears, watching E.'s brother struggling in the front seat.

"We're. Not. A. Couple," E.'s brother finally said, barely able to get the words out, knowing he'd failed to do as he said he would.

The real estate agent stopped the car and M., desperate, called out from the back seat "I'll be gay any day!"

Which caused quite a stir at the phone conference he was participating in.

M. and E.'s brother did eventually get the apartment, after promising the real estate agent, who was worried that she was muffing her first job, that they would avow their alleged homosexuality to anyone who asked.

Do you think we are entering the golden age of homosexuality?

The Swedish word for the day is diskriminering. It means discrimination.

- by Francis S.

Remember when you were a little kid and you woke up in the middle of the night, frightened, and called out to your mother or father and they came and got into bed with you until you fell asleep?

One of my co-workers told me that it works the other way around. Whenever she can't sleep, she crawls into bed with one of her sleeping sons, and the smell of little boy's hair and sweet breath soothes her insomnia and she forgets what she's been worrying about and falls asleep.

It sometimes works for me to put my arm around my sleeping husband, but I don't think he's quite as effective as a soporific.

The Swedish word for the day is natti-natti. It means night-night.

- by Francis S.

The American editor and his wife have gone down to Helsingborg for Christmas. They'll be back on December 28. Tomorrow, M., the t.v. producer, arrives from London.

The house feels empty. But it's only for a day.

The Swedish word for the day is gäster. It means guests.

- by Francis S.

When I was a child, and well into adulthood in fact, 364 days a year were merely a build-up to Christmas. When school started in September, I began planning, although it wasn't until after Thanksgiving that my mother allowed me to actually bother anyone else with my planning.

When at last everyone else recognized that it was time to begin preparing, there were the batches and batches of almond and chocolate spritz and gingerbread cookies to be made and decorated, russian teacakes and bourbon balls to be rolled, fudge to be cooked and tested with the candy thermometer to make sure it was at the right stage to be poured.

There were presents to be made as art projects in school, and Christmas assemblies to attend - although my elementary school was 90 percent Jewish, we sang half Christmas songs and half Hannukah songs, although I do remember dancing the horah in a huge circle one year - and school would be let out for the holidays, children running outside with their winter coats open and positively feverish with excitement.

There was the shopping to do, hours and hours spent choosing presents bought with my 25-cent-a-week allowance saved up over the year.

There was the tree to buy, and then decorating it with the ornaments pulled from boxes that were kept in the basement during the year, a collection that grew so much over time that they no longer all fit on my parents' Christmas tree.

At last, all my anticipation would come to a head when my mother would pack us all up and off to church. The children's choir I sang in had already been rehearsing for months by then, learning complicated and sublime Britten and Kodaly and Buxtehude and Haydn carols and anthems and anonymous spirituals for the Christmas Eve service at church, and we would sit in the choir stalls in our red robes, standing for the six or seven times we were allowed to let loose our pure vibrato-less voices. It was the absolute crowning of the year. In retrospect, bigger even than Christmas day itself with all its presents and turkey with stuffing.

And so it feels nice to be singing Christmas carols in a choir again at last, after four years of sabbatical. Of course, I've only had two rehearsals and the concert is on Saturday, but it brings it all back to me.

The Swedish word for the day is kör. Pronounced with a hard k, it means choir; pronounced with a soft k, which sounds like an sh, it means drive as in to drive a car.

- by Francis S.

When I was a child, I used to love to pore through my grandmother's old photo album - my grandparents were poor farmers and there were no more than a hundred photos in the album, black and white pictures of women in thin cotton dresses squinting grimly into the camera, men sporting five o'clock shadows dressed in their Sunday best, little girls with dirty hands holding on to curious speckled balloons, a few hand-colored high school graduation pictures.

I still like looking at photos, but I don't care to take pictures. I'm wary of the photo replacing the actual memory of what happened at that moment in time. I'm sure that some of my memories aren't memories, they're simply picture recall.

It's foolish, really. What will my grandchildren have to look at when I'm old if I never take photographs?

The Swedish word for the day is fotograf. It means photographer.

- by Francis S.

On Sunday, we walked with the American editor and his wife past Nordiska Kompaniet - NK, Stockholm's grand old department store on Hamngatan - and I don't know whether I ever noticed before that, just like the Marshall Field's in the downtown Chicago of my childhood, the store windows are all decked out for Christmas with animated displays and parents seem to bring their children to look at them.

As a child, I would have been scared out of my wits by the Santas in the windows at NK, however. Each window featured a larger-than-life animatronic Santa with huge veiny hands, and a face that seemed to bear the marks of a lot of hard drinking. Very creepy.

The Swedish word for the day is risgrynsgröt. It means rice pudding, something Swedes eat for breakfast on Christmas.

- by Francis S.

We met up with the priest and the policeman and their baby to see an exhibit of photographs and have coffee.

They spent two days in the hospital last week. The whole family. They thought something was wrong with Signe, the baby, but it turned out she just had an innocuous virus. The truth was, the priest and the policeman were exhausted, the policeman had the stomach flu and it was just too much for all of them. Well, maybe not Signe, she was fine. But the rest of the family was seriously sleep-deprived.

"How come no one talks about this before you have a baby?" the priest wanted to know.

I think they should have special clinics where parents can go and sleep and relax while someone takes care of the baby for a few days.

The Swedish verb for the day is att fika. It means to have a coffee.

- by Francis S.

The American editor and his wife arrived from the States yesterday in the midst of the Swedish Christmas hullabaloo that is Lucia, Sweden's own festival of lights. I'd started the day on the subway, hungover after a night of Czech food (sausages, sausages, sausages, schnitzel, more sausages) and bohemian beer with colleagues, rudely awakened to the harsh reality that is life as I sat waiting for my train in the subway and I could hear caterwauling somewhere behind me, which once I'd boarded the train, turned out to be Lucia hooligans - grown men and women got up in white gowns and Santa Claus suits and candles on their heads or those pointy duncecaps. They were all hopped up on early morning glögg and singing loudly yet somehow tentatively, "Gläns över sjö och strand."

Once at the office, the celebration continued and for once, I was happy to be served wine for breakfast. It turns out that there is nothing like a little morning hair of the dog that bit you to ease the pangs of too much Bohemian beer the night before.

Later in the day, I ran off to go meet the American editor and his wife, who hadn't been back to Sweden in nearly a year and half. They had been picked up at the airport by R. and J. who had also come to Stockholm, so I also got to meet Hannes for the first time, his face round like his father's, his nose like his mother's, but in general very much his own little pink squirming self (although he rested quietly in my arms for, oh, at least three minutes - he didn't even really complain when his mother and I put him into his little snow suit).

Then it was running back to the office, then off for more glögg at a party in Kungsholmen, then back home again to pick up the American editor and his wife and go down to the apartment of L., the chef, and a party with more glögg.

I am glögged out. But oh, it's wonderful to have the American editor and his wife back. It's going to be like a great big sleepover from now until the 12th day of Christmas, as our apartment fills up with friends and family.

The Swedish phrase for the day is hos oss. It means, more or less, at our place, hos being an equivalent to the French word chez, more or less.

- by Francis S.

I haven't had my hearing checked in years, but I suspect I am, like my father, slowly going deaf. Although he's quite a bit further along the way than I am. It is, I have little doubt, a genetic thing.

What's strange is that it's not like I don't hear things, it's more that the background noise moves forward and I can't pull out the foreground noise from it. It feels not like I'm going deaf, but rather that I just can't quite pay attention hard enough. It drives the husband mad. He thinks that I don't listen.

My question is whether this is deafness, or late onset Atttention Deficit Disorder?

The Swedish phrase for the day is Vad sade du? It means, more or less, Excuse me, what's that you said? Except the Swedes leave out the excuse me part.

- by Francis S.

Saffron means Christmas in Sweden. It's found in pastries and snaps and any number of other savory or sweet things this time of year, imparting a strong yellow color and singular spicy taste.

At the grocery store, one has to ask the cashier for saffron, which is kept in little paper packets and held in the cash register with the money, being worth more than its weight in gold on account of it being picked by hand from crocuses, each of which has only three strands, small but powerful.

We bought some at the Christmas market in Gamla Stan yesterday. It was only a dollar or so per gram, an incredible bargain. Saffron is in fact poisonous, and if we'd wanted to spend twenty dollars, we could have purchased a lethal dose.

I think dying by saffron could be a strange and spectacular death.

The Swedish word for the day is läcker. It means tasty.

- by Francis S.

Last night, A., the assistant director, regaled us with tales of her former life as a model in Paris.

"Once, I worked on this job where they filmed us on a roller coaster in Barcelona," she said. "The camera, which probably weighed about 300 kilos, was bolted onto the first seat, and the other model and I were in the second seat with a bunch of extras behind us. After the first couple of times we went around, they told me that I actually didn't need to scream so much and that no one wanted to see my tonsils.

"The other model was getting married in two weeks and he'd never had sex with his fiancée before. 'Please God, don't let me die,' he kept saying and he so regretted that he hadn't had sex with her before. 'Why?' he kept saying and well, I was wondering why I'd taken the job, too. I mean, think about it, the camera was just held in place by a few bolts!

"At least they let us stop when we started to feel sick. They didn't care about the extras though, and they were throwing up. I think we went around 67 times or something."

A. survived it all, and was now having dinner with us.

A. and C., her fiancé the photographer, went home at about 2:30, leaving the cats with us (the cats had spent the day at C.'s studio). So, the husband and I crawled into bed at about 3 a.m. and tried to sleep with all kinds of strange and noisy cat games going around us in the dark, games that involved the sound of claws skittering wildly along the wooden floors and unknown objects crashing to the ground.

The Swedish phrase for the day is berg- och dalbana. It means rollercoaster.

- by Francis S.

As a boy, I was always small for my age, smaller than my brother who was a year and a half younger for as long as I can remember. And I grew slowly - my voice changed when I was 15. Until I was 30 or so, I always looked younger than I was.

Then the grey hair started to appear.

Then, even worse, it started to disappear, or at least recede a bit.

Now, I would say I look at least as old as my 41 years. Definitely middle aged. My brothers and sister seem to look quite a bit like they have looked since their early twenties, definitely older and perhaps not as skinny, but more or less like they always looked. Me, well, I look much less like I did 10 years ago.

They disagree with me, of course. "You don't look more different than we do!" they insisted over Thanksgiving, and I even think they believed it. But it simply isn't true.

I am mostly resigned to looking middle aged, but it's hard to ignore the cultural equation that youth equals beauty, or more important, its corollary that the older one is, the more unattractive one is. I sort of deny it, and sort of get annoyed with myself for being bothered by it. And, I sort of don't care although, to be honest, that's actually a very small and insignificant part of me. Mostly, I do really care.

The Swedish word for the day is vårdhem. It means nursing home.

- by Francis S.

My niece, the beautiful Princess I., is seven years old. She is in the first grade and learning how to read and write. She's great at phonetic spelling: "ornjs for sal" she wrote on a little piece of paper and put it next to the bowl of clementines sitting in my mother's kitchen.

Her mother (my sainted sister) told me that the other day the Princess I. brought her a piece of a paper and handed it to her with a wicked smile.

"These are your points," she told my sister. The paper had three columns. The heading for the columns were "Princess I." "Daddy" and "Mommy." Under each column was a number - 1,000 under the Princess I., 100 under Daddy and one measly point under Mommy.

Raising children is a thankless job.

The Swedish word for the day is systersdotter. It means niece.

- by Francis S.

Arriving back home in Stockholm from Chicago, all bleary-eyed and faintly nauseous despite having upgraded to business class, amazingly it is the darkness that is so comforting. I suppose it is because it was deep midwinter when I first arrived here to live.

The thing about the weather in Stockholm is that if the summer is glorious with lots of sun and heat, the winter can be magical, with the sideways sun glancing over the city covered in snow, and inside the smell of saffron and cinnamon and wax from a candle extinguished, a dream of Christmas.

On the other hand, if the summer is cold and dark and wet, no amount of charm can make up for months of muffled darkness. It took awhile, but I have an inkling how weather can drive one to suicide.

Now, to slough off the jet-lag before I start work again tomorrow.

The Swedish word for the day is kanel. It means cinnamon.

- by Francis S.

What Francis almost couldn't bear was Edu's flat aspect. The weariness in the eyes and voice, the depletion of effort to be his usual emotional, almost theatrical self. Of course he understood, and he also felt he understood, at least in part, Edu's insistence that he wanted to tell only a few of his closest friends, he didn't want people to know because he didn't want to be treated with kid gloves, he didn't want to become The Victim.

Francis wasn't sure how he himself would act in the same situation, perhaps he would revel in the attention, acting as people expected him to act, be brave and charming and self-effacing about it and accept what pity he could, take the leaway granted him. He suspected that would be the route he took if he himself were sick.

But Edu had balked at the sudden kindness of the nurse, of the secretary who let him use the phone to call the main hospital to make an appointment to have more bloodwork done. It was funny, in a way, to hear Edu complaining about such kindness when his complaint about Barcelona was that people were pigheaded, stupidly stubborn and mostly, they were blindly unkind, unkind as if being kind cost them money, and oh, how Catalans loved money, Edu said.

(from a Barcelona journal, 1998)

It is World AIDS Remembrance day. Think, and link.

The Swedish word for the day is ibland. It means sometimes.

- by Francis S.

Last night we had dinner in Östermalm at a little trattoria. Perhaps it was a bit elegant - eight tables with white tablecloths, simple candles and menus with fancy script - to be called a mere trattoria, I suppose it was more of a real restaurant, where we celebrated the birthday dinner for P., the father of the friend from London and the closest thing I have to a father-in-law.

We sat, eating perfect vegetables - my mother claims that a restaurant should be judged by its vegetables - and talking all at once, the husband and I, P. and his wife E., and the friend from London who was here to do a photo shoot for H&M.

"Ingrid is 76 and she lives all by herself," P. told me, speaking about one of his neighbors on the island where the family summer house is, formerly the farmhouse of his grandparents. "She has no indoor plumbing - she still uses an outhouse, and she gets her water from a stream. She hasn't been to the city in five years."

I am astonished, as P. has hoped I would be, that there is still at least one Swede in the year 2002 who lives without running water.

Tomorrow, we leave at 10:30 a.m. on a plane that will take us to Chicago, where we will arrive at noon, nine hours after we left. We'll be back in a week.

Happy Thanksgiving.

- by Francis S.

The Swedish word for the day is Hannes. It is a boy’s name, rather uncommon, and happens to be the name of the son of R. and J.

Hannes will be 12 hours old today at 3 p.m. central European time. Go ahead, read more about Hannes and his parents and leave your own birthday greetings.

- by Francis S.

Have I mentioned that the husband and I are time optimists?

Have I also mentioned that the husband and I are, in fact, time idiots?

Yesterday, the husband had to be up early to go deal with some carpenters at work, who would be coming at 7 a.m. He set the alarm for 6:15, and got up without too much prodding from me. He left the house in the usual late-Fall pitch darkness, and made it there by 6:45. After nearly an hour of waiting, furious, he called up the foreman and got an answering machine. It was at this point he looked at his phone and noticed that the time, an hour after he’d arrived, was 6:45.

He had forgotten, for some reason, that he’d failed to set his alarm clock back when the time changed. Three weeks ago.

Time idiots, that’s us. Or maybe just lazy idiots.

The Swedish phrase for the day is kvart i sju, which would be written numerically as 6:45.

p.s. those bi-coastal wonders, East West, are back up and running in a new magazine format.

- by Francis S.

Last night, we met the guy from the Goethe Institute and his husband the South African publicist, as well as A. the assistant director and her fiancée, C., the photographer at a crowded table at Il Tempo, a restaurant the husband has been trying to get me to go to for years. We toasted to the promotion at work of the guy from the Goethe Institute, then off we ran to go see Hable con ella.

It always takes some emotional preparation to see an Almodóvar film, although I am inevitably impressed once I actually see it. Last night was no exception. It was melodramatic, strange, desperate, moving, a bit overwrought and had the usual perversely hopeful ending. Interestingly, he’s dropped the camp completely, which, depending on your perspective, allows for more subtlety of emotion. And he seems to have stopped giving the city of Madrid such a flamboyant role in his films as well – the hot oranges and pinks and reds are considerably toned down. Instead you have the Argentinian actor Darío Grandinetti, who is superb, his eyes and mouth constantly betraying a terrible and profound sadness, but ultimately not an inconsolable sadness.

It was Almodóvar who made me want to live in Spain. And although I hated and loved it all at once, I definitely was not disappointed when I finally did live there.

The Swedish phrase for the day is rörd till tårar. It means moved to tears.

- by Francis S.

Swedes seem to have an innate love of California, particularly Los Angeles. It is, no doubt, the promise of such endless sun. (Me, though a Chicagoan by upbringing and nature, I have the east-coast horror of L.A., a place which seems to value the buffed and tanned surface of things and deplores the intellectual. I'm a terrible snob when it comes to L.A. and obviously don't mind pissing off a good many people by saying so.)

Unlike Swedes, the promise of endless sun scares me. I love the changing of the seasons. Like the tremendous Frankenstein Christmas tree - put together from smaller trees - that is being put up on Gamla Stan's waterfront, a meter away from the spot where we played boule the past summer with the husband's agent: a perfect juxtaposition, icon of summer next to icon of winter.

The Swedish word for the day is strålande. It means radiant.

- by Francis S.

Sex makes the Internet go round. And you love to read about sex, don't you? I know I do. Even when I'm shocked when someone like Jane announces to the world that, in a fit of debauchery and after perhaps a few too many bottles of wine, she kissed a man for the first time. And then slept with him. (Uh, well, she only really did sleep with him, nothing more.)

Which put me in mind of my own days of debauchery. I did have a girlfriend when I was in my last years of high school. And we did sort of, well, get naked together. Which was fun, actually, although not nearly as fun as it was, and still is, to get naked with some guy, which these days would mean my husband, if you don't include the visits to the doctor, which actually are not more fun than being naked with a girl.

The last woman I got naked with was a certain MJ, when I was 22. I was supposed to be at home with my then-boyfriend. Instead, I got drunk with MJ and ended up at 7 a.m. the next morning hungover and smelling like sex. With a woman. My then-boyfriend was not amused. He never quite forgave me for it, not in the 13 years we were together.

So, my pretties, it's really easy for us homosexualists to write about crossing the line into decency and respectability, our fellow homosexualists are rarely shocked by such revelations. And, I am ashamed to say, I am in fact unduly proud of the fact, as if it made me more of a man. (I hate it when I exhibit this kind of vague internal homophobia, but what the hell. It's how I feel.)

Now it's your turn. Fess up. I want to hear about the last time all you big girls and big boys crossed the line, whichever line it may be for you.

Be brave.

Be honest.

Be really explicit and dirty. C'mon, titillate me. I could really use some entertainment these days.

- by Francis S.

Yesterday, as the husband and I were out shopping for clothes, for presents to take with us to America, for CDs and books and generally enjoying the fact that we had gotten up and out of bed and onto the streets before ten on a grey Saturday morning, we ended up in a kitchen store looking at monstrously large white salad bowls and chargers and coffee cups. Which gave me the idea of having a dinner party with all this outsized china and silver serving spoons and forks and knives. Wouldn't it be fun? The trick would be coming up with food that takes up volumes on a plate, but is reduced to nothing in the stomach. Soufflés? Rocket salads? Turkey drumsticks?

The Swedish verb for the day is att duka. It means to set the table.

- by Francis S.

The husband and I brought dinner to the priest last night: chicken paprika and rice and a batch of chocolate chip cookies all carefully laid up in plastic containers. Her husband, the policeman, was working the night shift, so she was alone with the baby for the second night of her life.

"I'm learning how to do everything with one hand," she said. "But it isn't easy." She's also learning how to deal with sleep deprivation, which isn't easy either, apparently. It is truly amazing how this little animal, three weeks old, can be so dependent, can demand so much attention, she said.

The priest is a worrier. She's worried that Signe will inherit her own worrying view of the world and not the sunny outlook of the policeman.

She will undoubtedly be her own person, I said. And I, who have a sunny outlook similar to the policeman's, happen to find worriers awfully interesting people.

"Yes, well, it may look interesting to you but it's no fun for me," the priest said, laughing. "And I certainly don't wish it on Signe."

The Swedish word for the day is föräldraskap. It means parenthood.

- by Francis S.

She sent me an e-mail saying that we should meet for a drink. It took weeks for me to answer, but when I said yes, it turned out that she knows the South African publicist, who she said could vouch for her good character.

So I sat in WC Bar (the toilet, she called it) and waited, smoking a bit nervously.

I had no reason to be nervous.

"I feel as if I know you," she said the moment she arrived. "I don't usually meet people from the Internet. Uh, I mean, I never have before."

She laughed. She made me laugh. We told how we ended up in love and in Sweden, which were connected of course. The drink turned into dinner at one of my favorite spots, Little Persia, where the service is abysmally slow but the food worth the wait. The husband joined us midway through the meal.

"I am Filipino-Hungarian," she told us. She said she is, in fact, a rare animal. "I think there's another one in the Northwest Territories in Canada somewhere."

It's fun meeting people from the Internet.

The Swedish word for the day is vänskap. It means friendship.

- by Francis S.

The city is dusted with snow and the Christmas tree is up in Mosebacke Square, albeit bereft of lights.

Tis the season? It's only November 11! And I thought Americans were bad about jumping the gun on the biggest consumer event of the year.

The Swedish phrase for the day is grattis på födelsedag, mamma. Which means happy birthday, mom.

- by Francis S.

There is no middle ground with Björk for most people, it's either love or hate. Me, I like the idea of her. Brilliant, intellectual, primal, uncompromising, challenging, musically sophisticated. But she's more fun to listen to than to listen to - I mean that what she says about what she does is easier to take than what she actually does, mostly.

"Mediterranean passion has been well documented, but nordic passion hasn't," she has said. She says Nordic passion is like a submarine, it runs deep.

A fascinating thought, that. My friend, the guy from the Goethe Institute, claims that it's hard to pick out gay Swedish men passing on the street because Swedes as a whole act so terribly asexual - his gaydar is useless here. Which doesn't contradict what Björk says, although apparently the passion runs too deep for my friend's tastes (or abilities).

I think what's so confusing for the outside world is that Swedes are just practical about sex, there's nothing mysterious about it to them. Which isn't to say that they can't be passionate. It's just a different kind of passion, as Björk says.

The Swedish word for the day is andra. It means second or another.

- by Francis S.

Some cities have a color. Morocco immediately springs to mind, where Marrakesh is pink, Meknes is a faded ochre, and Fez is all green roofs. Paris is grey as in grey stone, Washington is white as in white marble and Boston is red as in red brick.

The color of Stockholm is yellow, some of it like cream, some of it like mustard, but yellow nonetheless, although some may argue that it's more a narrow palette of yellows, pinks, reds, greens and browns. But if you ask me, if I try to picture it in my mind's eye, Stockholm is yellow, yellow and yellow.

The Swedish word for the day is färg. It means color.

- by Francis S.

I'm not really a fan of r&b or pop music, but I am a fan of R. She's smart and kind, self-assured and unpretentious. Her latest album just came out on Monday. And since I am American, I am allowed to indulge in hyperbole and say that I just love it. It's got a weird '80s Tom Tom Club-esque clava track and a sly Lesley Gore-ish '60s girl singer track, and a nasty ode to her ex which made me laugh, all of it produced to the point where it's just shy of being over the top. Which is the place to be. Perhaps I like it because I actually know her. I wonder what the critics will say.

The Swedish acronym for the day is KFUK-KFUM. It looks vaguely obscene in English, but it merely stands for YWCA-YMCA.

- by Francis S.

M., the t.v. producer, left for London today. The husband is off working, so I saw M. into his cab, feeling sombre in the cold and dark afternoon. We'll see him again at New Year's since the husband decided that we'll have a grand New Year's feast at our apartment with all the best of Stockholm society - the usual crew of photographers and producers and models and actresses and cultural attachés and priests and policemen and editors. Including M., of course. But no one knows when or if he'll ever be back for good.

So I'm wallowing in my melancholy, listening to Handel's Judas Maccabeus even if today is more appropriate for listening to a Requiem, considering it was All Souls Day on Friday. (I'd even gotten a last-minute invitation from Linnéa to go see the Verdi Requiem, but I needed to see M. off instead). As I'm listening, a soprano starts singing about "pious orgies, pious airs" and I can't help laughing at the thought of pious orgies. So I get myself some ice cream, which is as close as I get to a pious orgy.

I have to resort to vanilla with chocolate sauce on account of we have no real chocolate - I belong to the chocolate camp as opposed to the vanilla camp when it comes to pious orgies.

What's your position on pious orgies?

The Swedish phrase for the day is rest bort. It means gone away.

- by Francis S.

There is a certain type of Stockholm restaurant that has 6- to 7-meter-high ceilings with lovely murals dimmed by decades of smoke, big windows of clear and lavender and pale green glass, and the original Jugend-style tables and chairs from circa 1910, the whole place disarmingly evocative of a bygone era. The food is invariably husmans kost - meatballs with mashed potatoes and lingonberries, or veal hash with an egg on top and beets on the side - in other words, good old-fashioned stick-to-your-ribs Swedish food that was assuredly as popular when the restaurant opened, nearly a century ago, as it is today.

Pelikan is my favorite of all these graceful old restaurants. Which is where the husband and I sat last night with A., the former model and aspiring producer and her fiancé, C., the photographer.

"They didn't give me exactly the salary I asked for, " A. told us, in between bites of potato. "But I'm going to take the job anyway."

A. is no longer an aspiring producer anymore. She has been promoted to assistant director.

Here's to you, A., the assistant director.

- by Francis S.

In case you were thinking of sending me an e-mail, I thought you should know that I have a new e-mail address.

- by Francis S.

I am a time optimist. If it's really important, I'm there on time. But if no one will be insulted or think I'm unprofessional or there's no plane to miss, I have trouble getting there exactly when I think I will.

So the husband, who had the day off, arrived armed with a lasagne and a princess tårta at the apartment of the priest and the policeman 20 minutes before I did. He was only 40 minutes late.

We are quite the horrible pair of time optimists.

By the time I'd arrived, the lasagne was half gone because the baby was fussing and hungry and her mother the priest wanted to get in her own meal before serving up another one.

After everyone was fed, the baby lay squirming against her mother's cheek, as newborn babies squirm. "Aren't her ears just so, so - I wish I could keep them in my wallet!" the priest said.

The Swedish word for the day is babybjörn. Swedes claim it's a Swedish invention - a baby carrier that allows you to strap your infant comfortably to your chest. Of course baby means baby, and björn means bear, as in the animal.

- by Francis S.

Signe's mother is a priest, her father is a policeman. She's three days old today.

Happy birthday, Signe, three days late.

The Swedish word for the day is välsignelse, the word from which the name Signe is derived. It means blessing.

- by Francis S.

Some two and half hours north of Stockholm by train stands a manor house outside an ancient iron works. If you're lucky enough to be a guest of one of Sweden's large paper mills, you'll get to stay in the house, which is owned by the mill and has been restored to within an inch of its quaint 250-year-old life, all painted ceilings and reconstructed wallpaper and Gustavian chairs painted grey-green. But not so authentic that the bathroom floors aren't heated.

If you're even luckier, you'll be taken out into the woods some 70 kilometers north, where a guide who is Sweden's version of Crocodile Dundee - shall we call him Moose Svensson? - will usher you into a frigid nursery where hundreds of thousands of tiny fir trees sit under dim lights and dripping ceilings, and your guide Mr. Svensson can pour an entire forest's worth of seeds into your open palm.

Then, the charming Mr. Svensson can drive even further into the wilderness, past a line where everything goes from being silvery with frost to being covered under a foot of snow. Deep in the woods, Mr. Svensson will hit upon real old-fashioned lumberjacks. Except these lumberjacks drive monstrous machines that clutch and saw and strip a tree in seconds, so that you can't help but feel sorry for the tree while still remaining utterly fascinated by the diabolical cleverness of it.

Then your Mr. Svensson can haul out rolls with soft cheese and chrome thermoses full of hot soup with the gamey rich taste of moose meat. And he can build a fire in the snow and make coffee that tastes like mud over the fire, and there will be a hardy nordic mosquito or two that have, to everyone's horror, survived the snow.

Then, the girls who are with you can scream, not because they've seen a bear or a moose, but rather a mouse. And you can make a silly Swedish English joke about seeing a mus, which sounds pretty much like moose, and tell it to all the girls who laugh at you. And to Mr. Svensson of course, whose eyes twinkle in a most delightful way and laughs like the best of them, as he takes you back to the mill and the train that will bring you home to the city.

The Swedish word for the day is plantskola. It literally means plant school, which brings all sorts of funny pictures to mind of little trees learning how to become the proper shade of green and grow upwards instead of sideways. However, the proper translation of the word would be nursery.

- by Francis S.

We sat holding our collective breath in the first balcony in the dark of the Stadsteatern, one of Stockholm's two great public theaters, waiting for the scene toward the end of the second act in A Doll's House where the poor maid gets slapped for no reason, no reason at all.

We'd been prepared by my friend the actress, who plays the maid.

Apparently, during one of the early performances, the actress who plays Nora, a renowned Swedish diva of sorts, had slapped my friend but good and hard. "That really hurt," my friend said to her afterwards. "Why did you do that?"

The diva of sorts went all apologetic. She was having a bad day, or someone was mean to her, or someone had slapped her, or something.

The next day, however, in anticipation of the slap, my friend flinched.

The diva of sorts hasn't done it again, although last night's slap looked pretty damned realistic to me.

We - M., the t.v. producer, A., the former model and aspiring producer, and a gaggle of A.'s friends who had all been schoolgirls together in gymnasium - were so happy when our friend the actress came out for her bows with the huge bouquet of flowers we'd sent to her dressing room, a bouquet far bigger and lovelier than the pathetic red stalk or two of gladiolus that the diva of sorts had.

It is, I have no doubt, the beginning of what will surely be a spectacular career.

My poor darling husband missed it all on account of he was working. And then he was too tired to join us at Café Beirut afterwards, where we stuffed ourselves on an embarrassing amount of little dishes of spicy sausages and eggplant salads and savory pastries and artichokes soaking in garlic and lemon. Then for dessert we smoked strange perfumey tobacco from a tremendous water pipe as we lolled about on silk cushions, stuffed to the tips of our ears down to the ends of our toes.

I guess I didn't last very long this round. I bought a pack of cigarettes at lunch this afternoon.

The Swedish phrase for the day is stor succé. It means great success.

- by Francis S.

The good thing about getting sick is that it always induces me to quit smoking. So it's been five days and I'm still not longing for a cigarette, not even with the unbelievable stress at work.

The Swedish word for the day is högmod. It means pride, and not in a nice way.

- by Francis S.