A., the assistant director, is at last back from her five week sojourn in Marbella working on one of those cheesey but very popular docu-soaps. She worked her beautiful ass off.

"I fainted once," she told me as we sat having a more than two-hour long lunch at the Lydmar Hotel, me forgetting completely that I should have been getting back to work. "We were in Marrakesh and I hadn't eaten all day or drank enough water. I'd just finished doing everything I needed to do for the day, and then I got up and fainted. I'm so professional, I waited until I was done with my work."

She laughed. And I realized that she is, without a doubt, my best friend. Damn, but it's good to have her back. I missed her like hell.

The Swedish phrase for the day is att dö av törst. It means to die of thirst.

- by Francis S.

And now, to honor two requests.

1. Almost two weeks ago, Martin Pawley asked me to remember the one-year anniversary of the wreck of the Prestige, which ruined the green coast of Galicia in Spain one year ago on Nov. 13. (Beware the pop-up).

2. Robert Dunlap, who seems to live in Sweden although I'm not entirely sure, asked me to comment on the recent court decision in Massachusetts in the U.S., in which the court declared that it was discriminatory to not allow gay people to marry, I mean really marry, not just become legal partners.

I thought I didn't know what to say about it, but I ended up blathering on and on:

I suppose it comes down to the issue of whether it is possible to have situations that guarantee people separate but equal rights. Fifty years ago, the U.S. courts found this unconstitutional when Brown v. Board of Education came down the pike, undoing the awful previous 19th century Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

But I think you're right in saying that it's mostly symbolic as far as I can tell, aside from the fact that so far it is not, as you pointed, recognized universally, which actually is a fairly big thing, since gay people would lose their rights as couples upon entering states that don't recognize it... so gay people would only want to live in certain states, they would be at risk of being denied the right to see a dying partner in the hospital if they were on vacation in the wrong state when one of them took sick, etc.

What bothers me most about this is that for the most part, the arguments against it are all on religious grounds, and are a direct echo of arguments against, um, "miscegnation," which were made as short a time ago as the 1960s. Interestingly, it seems that the courts are at last leading public opinion rather than the other way round on the issue of gay rights, a war whose battles have been won largely on the cultural rather than the legal front - instead of courts barring discrimination, companies and municipalities have set up their own pro-gay policies because they have decided it's good business mostly. This is quite the opposite of what happened on the issue of race, where the courts led the way.

Here in Sweden, of course, it is partnership and not marriage that is the option for gay people, which guarantees, as far as I know, the same rights as marriage. The difference is that this is a law on the federal level in Sweden. But, in a way, it's ever so slightly worse in Sweden to not allow gay people to actually get married, since the church is much more of a state institution, although I think technically there is no more state church in Sweden. I think the government is talking about making the change. To my knowledge, the Netherlands was the first country to open up the institution of marriage, real marriage, to gay people.

See, I did have quite a bit to say about it after all.

The Swedish words of the day are äktenskap and partnerskap. They mean marriage and partnership.

- by Francis S.

Yesterday, I sat in a café just off Karlaplan with a microphone perilously close to my chin as Sophie, a journalism student who was working on a radio project that involved the concept of alien, asked a whole raft of questions.

She wanted to know what is alien about Sweden to those of us coming from the outside.

I answered, in my halting Swedish, all of her questions, telling her about meeting the husband in Barcelona, how Spain is more foreign than Sweden to an American, that Sweden is deceptively Anglo on the surface but in fact the culture is decidedly non-Anglo, a consensus culture as opposed to the individualist culture of my native land. I told her that I didn't think I'd ever really be Swedish, but I didn't care. I told her that I felt most Swedish when I was in the U.S., where I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the overabundance of, well, things. And I felt quite Swedish when Anna Lindh was assassinated. I told her that the first thing that struck me when I moved here is how people bump into each other on the street and they don't say "excuse me" or "sorry." But I hardly think about things being alien any more, because they aren't any longer.

I'll be most curious to hear what I sound like when you finish, Sophie.

The Swedish word for the day is främmande, which means, of course, alien or strange.

- by Francis S.

Jonno has found hisself another job: editor of Gawker's slutty cousin, Fleshbot, (as if Gawker itself weren't the nastiest, sexiest, funniest whore around, fooling everyone into thinking it is just a blog). Fleshbot is no doubt the knowingest porn site on the Net.

Go, Jonno, go.

And to think, my prediction nearly two years ago that he would make a good pornstar has come true, sort of.

The Swedish phrase for the day is i hetaste laget, which is the Swedish title of Billy Wilder's great Some Like it Hot, the movie with my all-time favorite final lines. I thought that it literally meant something like in the hottest company, but John Eje assures me it means getting a little too hot.

- by Francis S.

Undoubtedly, one of the most peculiar things about Sweden is The Ice Cream Truck.

It's not that strange that people would buy cartons of mediocre ice cream from a truck with a horn that tootles the opening bars to the theme song from old Laurel and Hardy films. What's strange is that there are trucks meandering around the city in the dark on a cold and rainy November evening, tooting their horns and then people are actually coming out of their apartments to buy ice cream.

Brrrr.

Aren't these people cold enough already?

The Swedish phrase for the day is det stämmer. It means that's right.

- by Francis S.

Whatever happened to quaaludes? We thought we were such hot shit in 1978 when we were teenagers, taking quaaludes. Even if they did make me puke. Or was it my brother who threw up?

The Swedish phrase for the day is periodiska systemet, which as far as I can tell is what the Swedes call the Periodic Table of Elements, akin to the web's own baseball poet Score Bard's Periodic Table of Bloggers, where I sit near the lower left-hand corner of the chart.

- by Francis S.

On Saturday, we had dinner with the manager of the r&b star, the fashion photographer and the guy on disability. A sort of men's night out, except we were sitting in our dining room.

The conversation, as it always does with the manager of the r&b star, meandered toward the topic of conspiracies and the evil of big anything, be it government, business or appetites.

And then came a round of bemoaning how things have gotten so much worse in Sweden over the past 15 years. I, of course, have no opinion, having no idea what Sweden was like 15 years ago and there is simply no comparison to the land of Mammon, um, I mean the States.

"Nobody has any morals anymore," the r&b manager said.

"All people care about is money," said the fashion photographer.

And I wondered, is it possible, as one gets older, to not think things were better when one was younger?

The Swedish word for the day is tjugolapp. It means twenty bucks, more or less, that is if one Swedish crown equalled one U.S. dollar. Oh, and happy birthday, Mom. Ja, må du leva uti hundrade år, and all that.

- by Francis S.

Today is 16 Brumaire in the year 212 de la Révolution according to the French Revolutionary calendar.

Just think, if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo, the, um, lingua franca might still be French!

And furthermore, if he hadn't caved into the Catholic Church, today could still be 16 Brumaire.

The Swedish word for the day is Frankrike, which is what the Swedes call France.

- by Francis S.

As we sat and watched tonight's rerun of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," (which is called "Fab 5" on Swedish television - I guess it doesn't translate well into Swedish... bögöga för heterokillen? Nah, that sounds really, really wrong; idiomatic expressions and humor, or the attempt at it, rarely come across properly in translation), the husband pointed out that the commercials were not for tampons and hair color, as they were when the show first aired. Tonight, it was all beer and cars. Which must mean that it's not chicks watching this show, as Channel 3 must have originally assumed, it's the laddies.

Beware. The, um, gays are taking over. No wonder all those African Anglican Primates are so worried.

And, you've already gotten three, count em, three Swedish words of the day!

- by Francis S.

I came back from nearly a week of being sick at home only to find that at long last, the little company I work for is making the switch: Our official language is no longer English, but Swedish. Which shouldn't faze me at all as for nearly two years now, meetings have all been in Swedish. Plus I'd already asked my fellow workers to stop speaking English with me, which has been moderately successful both from my end and their end.

But, I was still a bit stunned when the news came. And I realized, with a little pang in my stomach, that I am the last native-English speaker left in the office.

I'm alone, it's just me and the Swedes.

I hate how clingy I can be about English, as if it would abandon me somehow or that it was a precipice I could tumble over.

The Swedish word for the day is rädsla. It means fear.

- by Francis S.

Sitting at brunch with the priest, the policeman and their daughter Signe (who is now exactly one year and two days old, and was appropriately feted on Saturday with three cakes and lots of presents), plus the Dutchman, the architect from San Francisco and C., the fashion photographer, the subject inevitably arose.

"So," the architect asked the priest, in between bites of pancake and chicken hash, "isn't it funny that you're married to a policeman?"

The priest gets this all the time, I have no doubt.

"Actually," she said, reflecting on her duties working at one of the city jails, "we sort of deal with a lot of the same things, except he's supposed to be suspicious of all the people he deals with, and I'm supposed to have faith in them."

The Swedish word for the day fängelse. It means prison.

- by Francis S.

...snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

from the short story "The Dead" by James Joyce

Such a melancholy, cinematic story, "The Dead" is.

It snowed all day here, though the ground wasn't cold enough for it to stick much, and the trees are still in full leaf. Inspite of myself, I like it.

The Swedish phrase for the day bland annat. It means among other things.

- by Francis S.

We went to London to have Asian food. And more Asian food, and even more Asian food. Who would have thought that London would be a hotbed of excellent Asian cooking in über-designed settings that leave one a bit in awe? One would be hard-pressed to find better anywhere else. Woo-ee. It wasn't cheap though.

Afterwards, when we went for a drink to another restaurant known for its outrageous prices, the husband was decidedly disappointed with the egg-shaped toilets, which turned out to be vaguely glorified port-a-potties. Although we did rather enjoy walking ever-so-briefly on the stairs covered in chocolate. Between the retired football player and the fashion editor from Wallpaper, our various hosts and hostesses managed to show us quite the time on the town.

We even managed to wander through Shepherd's Bush, into Holland Park and down to Portobello Road in Notting Hill to catch Mr. Tarantino's latest pic at a movie theater that provides easy chairs for the viewers and serves vodka, which in this case helped temper the violence a bit. But just a bit.

London most definitely is quite the place to be. People from every corner of the world, subway accidents, fabulous wealth. It sure makes Stockholm feel small.

The Swedish word for the day is Storbritannien. It is what the Swedish call Great Britain.

- by Francis S.

As I walked home today, I passed a man with multiple piercings and wearing a t-shirt that read "I'm better-looking naked" (um, in Swedish of course, which would be "Jag är snyggare naken)."

If only I could say the same about myself. Still, the working out seems to help, even if only to make me feel healthier and oh, so manly.

Tomorrow, we're off to London for a weekend of fun, leaving at the god-awful hour of 6:40 a.m., on account of the cheap tickets.

The Swedish word for the day is hemifrån. It means from home.

- by Francis S.

Europe has become a secular continent. So writes Frank Bruni in the New York Times.

Thank, um, god for that.

I'd posit that some of the worst aspects of American culture - its obsession and squeamishness about sex and all the fallout from this which causes no end of grief for women and homosexualists like myself, just to take one example - come from the insidious influence of religion. And I agree with the article that the church's authoritarian rule over people's lives in Europe in the past is why it is so universally disdained now.

But what the hell is it with America?

[Philip Jenkins] said that for many Americans, the frequency with which President Bush invoked morality and religion in talking about the fight against terrorism was neither striking nor discomfiting. "But in Europe," he added, "they think he must be a religious nut."

My question is, why aren't Americans discomfited by all that Bible thumping? I hate it, and I believe in god, after a fashion, if one can call the collective goodness of human beings god.

- by Francis S.

Taylor House of Crushing Blow asks "What were you doing, or rather, what should you have been doing, with writing when you were sixteen?"

Me, I was dabbling in just about everything, even a little writing. It seems like about everyone else was leading lives of anguish of one sort or another.

Were you all full of anguish when you were 16?

The Swedish word for the day is sexton. It does not mean a church janitor, no, it is the way one spells out the number 16.

- by Francis S.

Next week is Marriage Protection Week in the U.S., by proclamation of George W. Bush, who now has his own blog. (Both links courtesy of the inimitable Erik Stattin.)

So, um, does this mean they're going to round up all the divorced people and put them into internment - uh, I mean, happy fun camps?

Wait, this proclamation is a slap at gay people, the biggest threat to marriage known to man - woman, too! How silly of me.

The Swedish word for the day is hjälp! It means, of course, help!

- by Francis S.

Last week, the husband got free tickets to go see a musical. A Swedish take on Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 movie "To Be or Not to Be." Being a card-carrying homosexualist, I'm not averse to musicals, but this one was vaguely dissatisfying, the songs left no one humming, the dancing was no more than adequate, and neither was the acting. And while the original movie is exempt because it came out before Hollywood was aware of exactly how evil the Nazis were, the toughest thing for me is that the story somehow makes me think of that disgraceful sixties sitcom "Hogan's Heroes": nothing like a bunch of bumbling, slapstick Nazis to get a laugh from an audience, since we all know how bumbling the Nazis were, especially when it came to rounding people up and killing them.

Not to mention the fact that an old flirtation of the husband's was in the cast, sans shirt most of the time. Built like a brick shithouse the man is, a veritable Hercules.

Come to think of it, I hated the musical.

The Swedish word for the day is schack. It means chess.

- by Francis S.

A man for all seasons. That's me. I could never live in California, or any other place where the difference between winter and summer consists of different flowers, or a little more or a little less rain. I need something less subtle than that. Like seas freezing over and snow tumbling from the sky. Or a faint curtain of green appearing on the trees after months of bare brown branches and crocuses popping up underfoot. Or like now, leaves turning gold and scarlet and orange.

Autumn is wonderful. Although I have to admit, I wasn't too keen on this past weekend's building-wide cleaning day in preparation for winter: the neighbors all got together and cleaned out the attic, the cellar and the stairs, sweeping and hauling and vacuuming. Sometimes, I'm not so good at these kinds of group activities. I think to myself, why can't we just pay someone to do it? I'm a lazy American at heart.

The Swedish word for the day is blad. It means, of course, leaf.

- by Francis S.

There's been a massacre in Kungsträdgården, the park in the center of Stockholm that was once a royal garden. Fully a quarter of the linden trees in the northeast corner have been cut down. It made me gasp to see it. The husband told me they cut them down more than a week ago, on account of the trees were diseased.

Strange how one can feel so deeply for trees.

The Swedish word for the day is sjuk. It means sick.

- by Francis S.