It's post-Easter Christian holiday time again in this quite secular country. Tomorrow is Ascension, and most of the country is taking an extra day off on Friday and making it a four-day weekend.

We're going out on friday to Birds Island in the archipelago to help A., the assistant director, and C., the fashion photographer, paint their summer house. Apparently, we're going to have to dab every single knothole in the pine panelling with some stain-blocking paint before we get down to business. Lucky us.

The Swedish word for the day is vit. It means white.

- by Francis S.

I've gone Swedish when it comes to mobile phones, or cells as they say over in the, er, Brave New World.

My beloved ancient T28 world phone died a couple of months ago, and I was given a nasty dirty white T29 from our office IT guy as a replacement. The nasty dirty white T29 literally had a screw loose, which couldn't be screwed back in and snagged on everything. After one snag too many, I finally nagged the office IT guy enough that he told me to go get a new one. Which is a Sony Ericsson T68. I have the biggest crush on my T68, even if the husband thinks it's old-fashioned looking. He is not the least bit jealous.

When we ran into our friend I., the former back-up singer for David Byrne, I started crowing about my newfound love.

"I have the same one," she said to me. "I got it from Vodafone. It takes too long after you hang up. But you can have pictures on it that you can take with a camera attachment. When my boyfriend rings, I have it set up so that a photo of his dick shows up on the screen. Do you want to borrow the camera attachment?"

As I've said before, Swedes like taking pictures with their phones.

I'm wondering exactly what kind of picture I should have appear when the husband rings me up, and exactly how difficult it could be to explain during a meeting with a client if I forgot to turn my phone off and he rang me up.

The Swedish word for the day is snopp. It means, um, willie.

- by Francis S.

The cycle is relentless, unstoppable: death and birth. Today is the baptism of Signe, and the husband and I will stand in front of the altar at Kungsholmskyrkan and take turns with her parents, holding her while a priest recites words that have been passed down for at least a few generations. And then, after she's been sprinkled with water, I will read my own blessing over Signe, stolen from Walt Whitman's 1955 preface to Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men - go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families - re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

When I wrote to the priest, Signe's mother, that I wanted to read this as my blessing, she wrote back: "Please read it on Saturday and later help us to teach her to do all the things in the poem. It´s full of very good advice..."

I suppose it won't be easy, teaching all these things.

The Swedish word for the day is dop. It means baptism.

- by Francis S.

When I am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

Dido's lament, from Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, libretto by Nahum Tate


This morning, Thursday, May 22, my friend Alma Eklund killed herself. She was funny, childish, warm, odd, cat-like, startlingly beautiful, an actress just at the beginning of her career and so sure of herself on stage in front of the audiences at the Stadsteatern.

She could be so tenacious. But she wasn't tenacious enough in the end. None of us are, when it comes down to it.

The Swedish verb for the day is att sörja. It means to mourn.

- by Francis S.

When I was 18, my mother gave me an address book for my birthday. I've hauled it from apartments in Champaign, Illinois to Atlanta, from Chicago to New York and to some nine separate apartments and houses in Washington, D.C., finally dragging it to Barcelona and now Stockholm, not to mention countless holidays here and there. It's ragged, and some of the pages are so full I have to put new addresses under people's first names. But I'm unwilling to get a new one because I can't bear to throw away the addresses of the dead.

The man who I helped take care of who died of AIDS in the late eighties. My crazy roommate in Barcelona. My best friend's first lover. The director of the Washington Mozart Choir. My first love. All my grandparents. My uncle Ed, my uncle Gerald, my uncle Wilbur. A guy I hardly knew from film school.

Suicides, accidents, illness, old age.

It's a memorial, and a memento mori, my address book.

The Swedish word for the day is påminnelse. It means reminder.

- by Francis S.

We never made it to Ithaca.

Instead, we spent our days racing about in our little car looking for stony beaches around the island, which was nothing like those bone-dry, whitewashed and blue-doored village dotted islands of the Aegean, islands that one can imagine haven't changed much since the time of Alexander and the age of heroes and capricious gods and goddesses. Instead, Lefkas is green and mountainous and mediterranean and has spectacular and terrifying views in place of charm.

But, we did spend the early afternoon at one empty beach hemmed in by huge krasts in the water where A., the assistant director and the husband waded into the calm sea but were nearly smashed into the rocks when swells suddenly appeared from nowhere, forcing us to grab our clothes and run back up the bluff. We figured that whatever minor god ruled that beach wanted to be left alone. Maybe the age of capricious gods and goddesses hasn't yet ended, at least not on the island of Lefkas.

"It was really scary," the husband said. He and A. had been in the water for only about a minute.

We brought back huge five-liter tins of Greek olive oil, and suntans that had no trouble surviving the plane ride home.

The Swedish word for the day is stranden. It means the beach.

- by Francis S.

Tomorrow morning, we leave for the Ionian islands, off the west coast of Greece. Maybe we'll even make it to Ulysses' home:

Ithaca

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians
and the Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon.
You will never meet such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your body and your spirit.
You will never meet the Lestrygonians,
the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.

Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,
buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

C.P. Cavafy, 1911 (translated by Rae Dalven)

Ah, Cavafy; one of the great gay poets.

The Swedish phrase for the day is när och fjärran, which would be translated as far and near although the words are transposed in translation. It happens to be the name of a travel program on Swedish television.

- by Francis S.

Today is Valborg - or more properly valborgsmässoafton, in typical Swedish fashion a holiday that starts on the eve of the actual day - which should be celebrated with bonfires and university students singing "Sköna Maj" and a bit of mild revelry. The holiday may be named for a catholic saint, but it's really just the old Viking holiday to welcome the spring, and is no doubt a lot tamer than it was 1000 years ago, when people believed in the witches that were supposedly wildly cavorting about every April 30.

The husband and I will welcome it with a bowl of soup and a bottle of wine. After a snowy weekend, spring does seem to be here, a fact worthy of celebrating, even in our meager fashion.

The Swedish word for the day is annars. It means otherwise.

by Francis S.

The husband and I have been asked to be godfathers to Signe, the nearly six-month-old daughter of the priest and policeman.

O, how I love babies. Especially Signe.

It's the most pleasing of responsibilities, to be a godfather.

The Swedish word for the day is hedrande. It means honored.

- by Francis S.

Okay, so I lied. It wasn't a skiing wedding, despite it being held in Åre. It was more like a, um, television personality wedding, although it was mostly just the bride and groom who were the television personalities. Oh yeah, and the press, despite all attempts to keep the thing secret. There was lots of press standing outside the church as I ran into the sanctuary, late as always, the last to slip into my seat in the back before groom and his best man walked up to the front of the church. There was even a helicopter with cameramen circling round the wedding party which had been brought up to the top of the mountain for aprés-ski, complete with the sun making its way down to the Norwegian mountains in the west.

The bride was strong and striking and full of laughter, the groom charming and unshaven and a bit worried about whether he liked his suit. The ceremony started 25 minutes late because someone forgot the bouquets for the bride and her maid of honor, and my husband had to run back with the father of the bride to retrieve them from the hotel.

My favorite part during the seven-hour long dinner after the ceremony was when the bride's mother (a pop legend in Sweden) sang to the priest, in her deep whisky tenor, some song about not letting love pass you by. I had earlier stood in the men's room, peeing next to the priest and he had told me he had family, which my husband laughed at when I told him.

"Huh! I'm sure he must be gay," the husband scoffed when I told him. It's not always easy to tell these things, cross-culturally, even if I am an avowed homosexualist myself.

Which is why the song the bride's mother sang was no doubt a message of sorts. I kept watching him as she sang, but I couldn't read at all what he might have been feeling, except that he was no doubt all overwhelmed by the attention and a bit full of himself, a bit scared, at officiating at such a wedding.

The first Swedish phrase for the day is helt fascinerande, which means utterly fascinating. The second Swedish phrase for the day is tusen tack, Elke, which means a thousand thanks, Elke.

- by Francis S.

We're off to Åre for a skiing wedding. Fascinating.

The Swedish word for the day is bröllop. It means wedding.

- by Francis S.

While the Guardian reports that England's young homos have decided that a (small) potbelly is sexier than a stomach with abdominal muscles as well-defined as trigonometric functions, I don't think they were talking about potbellies (even nascent ones) on 42-year-old guys with grey hair.

So I'm on a diet, just like Mig, and making the 45-minute walk to and from the office everyday.

We're going to the Ionian archipelago for a week in May with A., the assistant director and her fiancé C., the photographer, and I want to look good in bathing trunks. Er, make that decent enough.

The Swedish verb for the day is att banta. It means to diet.

- by Francis S.

Budapest has hardly changed in five years: crumbling facades, grand avenues, and those wonderful men's thermal baths, where they give you to wear a little apron that looks like a white dish towel and functions like a metaphorical figleaf. It was me, the husband and a bunch of guys lolling about in hot water and padding around showing off our pale, tanned, hairy, smooth, flabby, skinny, round or nearly non-existant butts. It was humbling, all those butts, not to mention the thought of all the other butts that had been sitting on the same stones for the past 500 years in the same exact place under the same exact shallow dome, with its tiny hexagonal windows and clear and colored glass.

"You feel so connected to history," the husband said. "It's kind of a weird feeling."

Weird, but relaxing. Just what we needed.

The Swedish verb for the day is att bada. It means, of course, to bathe.

- by Francis S.

Once upon a time, I went to Budapest to take the waters at the baths of the great Gellert Hotel. A special price for foreigners (only twice as much as for Hungarians), armies of round little women in white lab coats (even in the men's locker room), and men's thermal baths straight out of a historical porn novel set in Rome, or maybe Turkey.

It's time to go back.

Budapest, here we come for the Easter holidays.

The Swedish word for the day is påskkärringar. It is a word that doesn't have a simple translation, because it refers to the little girls (and a few little boys, I suppose) who dress up as freckle-faced witches and beg for sweets at Easter time.

- by Francis S.

Whenever I arrive in the U.S., the most shocking thing is that everyone speaks English. It feels too simple and not to be trusted, and I find myself translating everything into Swedish in my head, turning myself completely around and making myself crazy.

Which leads directly to the second most shocking thing, which is to find that I've become inarticulate, no matter that my father thinks I am the most garrulous of all his children. I used to be garrulous, now I'm just vague and not so good at explaining myself, so it takes more words to say what I think. I haven't become so European as to give up trying to let everyone know what I think about everything, a trait that is characteristic of us Americans. But it takes an awful long time to do it these days.

The third most shocking thing is that the entire first section of the Chicago Tribune is devoted to war coverage, there are all of three articles out of some hundred that cover anything besides the war. This is actually not shocking, it's to be expected, but it does take the fun out of having a real U.S. paper and the time to read it every morning. And makes me uneasy, because there are many other things going on that people should know about.

It's good to be home again, despite the sleepiness from jetlag. By home I mean, sleeping at the husband's side in Stockholm.

The Swedish name for the day is Jon Blund, who is the Swedish sandman.

- by Francis S.

And now I'm off to America for a holiday.

I hope airport security isn't too painful.

The Swedish word for the day is sticka! It means get lost or beat it.

- by Francis S.

Miguel is back and better than ever. And he's started a group ex-patriot- um, I mean expatriate blog which I am plugging shamelessly, despite the fact that I am one of the members.

- by Francis S.

The stage was tiny and the room intimate, but with an astonishing and potentially distracting view looking down toward the old town. We arrived at the last minute, by invitation of R. the popstar, who sang a couple of her latest hits in a funky arrangement for acoustic guitar and three-part harmony. It was a luxury to be in such a small space, where the singers aren't embarrassed to begin again if they make a false start, where the guy who, I was told, sometimes plays guitar for a great Swedish jazz band, tells the crowd how it feels to be able to hear each individual clap, each separate laugh (strange, he said), where it's impossible not to be charmed when the headliners for the evening - an obscure Swedish singer who told us she once had a hit song in Japan, and her boyfriend, the aforementioned guitarist - sang "There ought to be a moonlight savings time." I was enthralled by that song. I wish I could find the lyrics somewhere.

The Swedish word for the day is igår kväll. It means yesterday evening.

- by Francis S.

I've bought 100 shares of Jessica, 50 shares of Aaron, and 15 each of Nancy and Erik, yet I am worthless myself. O, the shame. I hate it when I get sucked into a new blog game.

The Swedish word for the day is aktier. It means, of course, shares.

- by Francis S.

Museums are a sop to the middle class, who aspire to having objects of great value and sophistication, but basically are dependent on the rich to donate what they don't want, or what society forces them to give up. Me, I'm as bourgeois as can be, I love museums. So, it was with anticipation that I went with the husband to look at Spanish paintings at the National Museet in Stockholm.

I was a bit disappointed at these particular riches on display - they were a bit meager, a bit repetitive. Still, there were the brutal Goya war etchings, aptly timed. But even more touching were side-by-side Velasquez portraits of an infanta and a dwarf. The princess, no more than four years old, was painted with great care and attention to the detail of the cage of a dress she was wearing, and to the velvet curtain behind her, and to the vague sorrow in her young eyes. The dwarf, however, was rather roughly painted in, his clothes dirty and his nose needing to be wiped, a forgotten plaything half-smiling back at the Spanish court painter. One would be hard pressed to choose which child was more pitiable.

The Swedish phrase for the day is parkering förbjuden. It means parking forbidden.

- by Francis S.