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.

I'm slowly but surely working my way toward writer's block, posting less and less, writing things over and over in my head but unable to put them to paper. Or screen. It's a sad state of affairs, being reduced to writing about being unable to write. The absolute lamest of the lame, the bottom of the barrel when it comes to writing, right up there with writing about referrer logs and breakfast menus.

And yet, I refuse to give up. There are in fact things to be said about my birthday dinner last night, with the fashion photographer's children discussing the war and Swedish reluctance to make a fuss with the guy from the Goethe Institute. And today's coffee with the priest and the policeman, cooing over their 5-month-old daughter, the priest teaching my husband how to knit and telling us "this year, I'm not growing flowers on the terrace. There will be 15 kinds of grass instead."

The Swedish word for the day is tom. It means empty.

- by Francis S.

Spring has arrived, with a vengeance, or as much as a vengeance as spring can have in Sweden. It's warm, relatively speaking, and sunny, and it was glorious to take a day off yesterday and wander around the city, stopping in a konditori to have coffee and a sweet, and to have A. the assistant producer telling me that Lenin lived in Stockholm, and that he bought a worker's cap in Åhlens (or was it an overcoat from PUB?) that he wore in one of the many well-known photos of him. I feel so good, I even felt sorry for the honey bee that flew numbly into the kitchen when I opened the window last night, hearty enough to have buzzed around during the day, no doubt, but the cold night was too much for any insect, I suppose.

You'll notice I made a slight adjustment to the short autobiographical note to the left.

The Swedish word for the day is året. It means the year.

- by Francis S.

Last night A., the assistant director and her fiancé, C. the fashion photographer, were over for pad thai and afterwards we forced them to watch Pink Flamingos (to be honest, we were only going to watch a few choice bits but ended up seeing the whole thing).

The husband said "It's an art piece," but I insist it's a comedy, a Dogme film ahead of its time, outside of the realm of art. Or the realm of anything, really.

A. managed to laugh through most of it, although she couldn't watch the chicken scene or the part where Divine eats dogshit.

Afterwards, we watched the trailer for the movie, which consisted solely of interviews with people as they came out of the theater. One guy said, "John Waters has his finger on the pulse of America, and his thumb up its ass."

That quote should be in Bartlett's. And it's something to aspire to.

The Swedish word for the day is fiffig. It means ingenious.

- by Francis S.

Stockholm's pulse slows down to nearly nothing in the dark months of winter, speeding up only with the advent of the sun as the vernal equinox is passed. It's taken a couple of years, but my heart now seems to beat nicely in synchonicity with Stockholm. Which is not to say that it's nice. Going into hibernation is a numbing experience, just this side of depression.

Last night, the husband and I made one last play at staving off the sadness of winter, which I desperately hope is in its death throes, spending a night in the brightly lit kitchen, making empanadas of beef and sultanas and garlic and onion and tomato and egg, just like his mother used to make. It is a luxury to spend a late afternoon and evening preparing elaborate food, remembering that gathering and preparing food took all the time and energy of our ancestors. Remembering that we could be living just now in a hinge of time, our fingers stuck in the door of a war that could mean profound changes for us, difficult changes, ugly changes. Or mean nothing, nothing at all. Did it feel like this when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated? One never knows until afterwards.

In lieu of certainty, we're now giving the apartment what I hope is a spring cleaning, the windows wide and the sun streaming in, unstoppable.

The Swedish word for the day is påtaglig. It means obvious.

- by Francis S.

Although there is no apparent connection to the massing of armies on Iraq's borders, it is nonetheless unsettling to see Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria all done up in camouflage garb and face paint for her military training.

Are we on the brink of a new age of anti-diplomacy, the United States against the world?

The Swedish word for the day is lumpen. It is a slang word for the compulsory military service required of Sweden's young men, and apparently its Crown Princess as well.

- by Francis S.

The church in Huddinge has little to distinguish it from hundreds of other Swedish churches: It's small, spartan, built of stone with stucco walls, 900 years old. It is a thing of simple and great beauty.

There are a few obvious later touches, such as electric chandeliers and wooden pews with panels painted to look like marble (or painted to look like they were painted to look like marble, rather than to actually look like marble). I find myself wondering, as I sit behind a chamber orchestra in the middle of a rehearsal for a performance of Bach's Magnificat at the church in Huddinge, what exactly would be most shocking to a Swede from the year 1100. Would it be the baroque trumpeter playing games on his mobile phone during the movements where he doesn't have to play the trumpet?

It is the husband's birthday today. I can't tell exactly how much he's joking when he says it feels awful to turn 34.

The Swedish word for the day is sliten. It means worn.

- by Francis S.

I've lived most of my life in cities, and I grew up in the suburbs, where the lights from the houses and offices and streetlamps obscure the stars. If I lived in the country, I could learn the night sky. I've always felt a bit sorry that I've never really seen the Milky Way as a smudge of white, never learned the constellations except Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

But it's still not enough to tempt me.

I'm an urban kind of guy.

The Swedish verb for the day is att undvika. It means to avoid.

- by Francis S.

Oh, yeah. That guy from Textism got the Best European or African 2003 Bloggie Award.

I voted for Duncan, and then I was hoping that D. would actually win.

Oh, well. Next time. Congratulations to the guy from Textism.

- by Francis S.

If I were a real man, I would've given up English for Lent.

Unfortunately, I'm spineless, controlling and pathically devoted to my mother tongue. I'm also wallowing daily in utter shame and self-pity because after four years of living in this comfortable city not far from the arctic circle, choir rehearsal is the only place I really speak my mediocre Swedish without switching back and forth to English as soon as I feel the least bit frustrated at not being able to express exactly what I think. Is it really perfectionism - wanting to get everything right all the time and without a trace of an accent - that's doing me in?

I've turned into the thing I dreaded when I moved here: the American who doesn't bother to speak the language.

Woe is me.

You can hit me now.

The Swedish verb for the day is att sparka. It means to kick.

- by Francis S.

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.