I've been thinking for the past year and a half that I'm past my sell-by date. So I don't know exactly what to say when these kinds of things happen.

The second Swedish word for the day is vad, and it means what?

- by Francis S.

The historical museum was closed today as it is every Monday, although there were a few news photographers lurking outside when a co-worker and I stopped by at lunch today to see if we could catch a glimpse of the pool of blood in the museum's courtyard. Because, you see, on Friday, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, in a fury, threw one of the spotlights on the periphery of the courtyard into the red pool, which was part of an installation called "Snow White and the Madness of Truth," by an Israeli artist living in Sweden.

The ambassador said that the piece - a small white boat with a picture of a Palestinian suicide bomber on the sail, floating in a sea of water dyed the color of blood - promoted terrorism and was an incitement to genocide. He was eventually thrown out of the museum. It's been all over the Swedish news since Friday, vying for attention with coverage of the trial of the murderer of Anna Lindh.

The Israeli government has called for the work to be dismantled.

The Swedish government has said, more or less, that this won't happen.

Me, I want to decide for myself. The piece is terribly provocative - it is part of a show held in conjunction with a conference on genocide. And it is, without a doubt, implicitly critical of Israel. But the underlying message seems to be that both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering.

But, really, I haven't seen it yet, so it's not quite fair to decide anything just yet.

The Swedish word for the day dom. It means judgement.

- Francis S.

Do you suppose that more than half the world's adults still live in the same house, flat, hut, palace, log cabin or tent that they have lived in from birth?

I wonder what happens when any of these billion or so people contemplate moving somewhere else. Does it make one crazy and irrational? It must, if you can reckon by the husband, who has lived in the very same flat we live in now since he was brought home from Södersjukhuset as a tiny baby. He's just a tangle of emotion and worry.

Poor guy.

Wait, poor me. Because I have to be a rock.

The Swedish word for the day is yet again, lägenhet, which was the Swedish word of the day a little more than a week ago. Look it up there if you don't remember what it means.

- by Francis S.

I'm in shock.

A member of the Catholic clergy has made a pronouncement concerning homosexuals that didn't deeply offend me. Contrary to the declaration of the Vatican's top advisor on family concerns, Colombian Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, that condoms have tiny holes in them that let HIV pass through, Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels says that the fact that condoms save lives by helping to prevent HIV infection supercedes concerns that they are a form of birth control.

Don't you just love that wacky Catholic church? Next thing you know, the Catholic church is going to be saying that the earth revolves around the sun. Or even that all human life is sacred, even post-natal life!

Welcome to the 20th Century, Cardinal. I would even go so far as to say the mid-20th century, say, 1962 or so?

The Swedish word for the day is sjätte budet. It means the sixth commandment.

- by Francis S.

On Saturday, a friend of a friend of mine was visiting from Chicago - the cat veterinarian. He had dinner with A., the t.v. director and her fiance, C., the fashion photographer and the husband and I.

The five of us got into a small argument about which feels older, Paris or London.

For me, it's London. Narrow streets, low-slung buildings, no rhyme or reason to the layout, every road probably started as a cow path.

Paris has all those grand avenues, block after block of grey stone Second Empire apartments punctuated here and there by monuments and palaces and elegant gardens.

"But didn't London burn in the 1600s?" said A. "Ile St. Louis and, well, Notre Dame, they're like from the 1100s or older, aren't they? Paris is so much older."

Okay, so it has some older buildings, even, well, big chunks of the city are older maybe. But it just doesn't feel as old to me.

Don't you think London feels older than Paris?

The Swedish word for the day is medeltiden. It means middle ages.

- by Francis S.

The twelfth day of Christmas has come and almost gone, and those damned 12 drummers are pa-rum-pa-pa-pumming away in my head, reminding me that I go back to work, um, tomorrow.

I didn't do my winter vacation homework - I promised my boss to read a particular book about public relations - and we never managed to drag all our thousands of kronor worth of coins to the bank. I never wrote those New Year's cards I'd planned to write, and the apartment probably could use a deep-cleaning.

But the husband and I did manage to get to Chicago and back without a major mishap or nasty comments about homosexuality at passport control. Christmas itself was unusually calm, and while my nieces and nephews continue to grow up at a frightening pace, somehow it's less hectic and nervewracking that they no longer jump all over us with wild abandon for a solid week of Christmas.

We spent a grand New Year's Eve in a sort of glass pavilion in the middle of Norrmalmstorg, eating lobster and dancing like mad. And this very afternoon we babysit for baby Signe without her crying at all.

But most of all, we even managed to put in an offer on an obscenely huge apartment on Odenplan, an offer which has been accepted and we're just waiting for a final okay from the bank before we sign on the dotted line, sometime before Monday. (The apartment is just obscenely huge by Swedish standards; Americans outside of Manhattan would merely consider it a bit on the large side.)

I can't believe it. We're going to move. And the husband has lived his whole life in the apartment we're in now.

Holy cow, Batman.

The Swedish word for the day is lägenhet. It means, of course, apartment.

- by Francis S.

And now, before signing off for a week as the husband and I prepare to evacuate the country of Sweden for the teeming shores of Chicago, I leave you with a profound Christmas thought from the pen of Trey Parker, a little something guaranteed to offend just about everyone:

The Virgin Mary was sleeping
When Angel Gabriel appeared...
He said, 'you are to be the virgin mother'
And Mary thought that was weird..
Mmm mmm mmm mm mmm m mmmmmmm,
M mmmmmm m mmm mmmm mmmm,
But then Gabriel said to Mary,
'My child, have no fear'

Mmm mmm mmmm mmm mmm mmmm mmm mmmm
And still be a virgin, Mary...
mmm mmm mmm mmmmm mmm
And still not be considered flawed...
Mmmm mmm mmmm mmm,
Mmmm mmm mmm
But you're still a virgin
In the eyes of God!

from "The Most Offensive Song Ever" from Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics

I'm so puerile sometimes.

The Swedish phrase for the day is god jul och gott nytt år. It means, of course, merry Christmas and happy new year.

- by Francis S.

From an interview with Tony Kushner in Mother Jones:

TK:... I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn't get it what it wanted. As a result, it's a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

MJ: When was the last time that a belief in the system paid off?

TK: It was the day they got that fucking Ten Commandments monument out of Alabama. ...

I've always felt that it was the right who had convinced Americans that government was evil, and that rather than making it do what you want it to do, everything should be privatized and that the pressures of the market will fix everything that's wrong with schools, with social services, what have you.

So I shudder to think that Tony Kushner might be correct, and that the left has likewise turned its back on government. But, sadly, I think he's right.

Am I some kind of fool to think that the government isn't an evil entity, that we should put our efforts into making it work better rather than just giving up on it? I guess Tony Kushner wouldn't think so.

The Swedish word for the day is gärna. It's not directly translateable, but my Swedish-English dictionary defines it as with pleasure.

- by Francis S.

We went on Saturday and saw "Matrix: He Died for Your Sins" with A., the assistant director and her fiancé, C., the fashion photographer. And then we went on Sunday with the H.R. director from work and her husband to see Handel's "Messiah" in the Great Church.

I've never been too keen on Christ stories ever since they made us watch "Cool Hand Luke" every year in English class when I was in high school. (Yeah, it's a classic movie, and Paul Newman looks damn hot, but I hate it.)

Handel definitely has it way over the Wachowski brothers. All that wooden acting, deplorable dialogue, and way too many of those squid things, "Matrix: The Crucifixion" just doesn't cut it.

Give me a baritone ripping his way through "Why do the nations rage so furiously together" any day, no matter how hard those pews are at the Great Church. Handel wins, um, hands down.

The Swedish word for the day is präktig. It means, appropriately, splendid but according to O.P., it is more often used to describe someone who is a boob.

- by Francis S.

Despite the days being veiled in grey, the city has put on all its Christmas finery. There are glittering lights strung everywhere, Christmas markets on various squares, and on Skeppsbron stands the huge, perfect Christmas tree that has been carefully pieced together over the past couple of weeks, the live branches hung on a massive trunk and the whole thing covered in a net of tiny lights - it's so terribly Swedish to want to have a real live tree but to have it perfectly shaped at the same time, then to make the effort to do something so elaborate that ends up with such simple, yet satisfying results. That tree amazes me every year, I feel like a giddy little kid every time I walk past it.

The Swedish word for the day is utmaning. It means challenge.

- by Francis S.

Atlantis


I thought your illness a kind of solvent
dissolving the future a little at a time;

I didn't understand what's to come
was always just a glimmer

up ahead, veiled like the marsh
gone under its tidal sheet

of mildly rippling aluminum.
What these salt distances were

is also where they're going:
from blankly silvered span

toward specificity: the curve
of certain brave islands of grass,

temporary shoulder-wide rivers
where herons ply their twin trades

of study and desire. I've seen
two white emissaries unfold

like heaven's linen, untouched,
enormous, a fluid exhalation. Early spring,

too cold yet for green, too early
for the tumble and wrack of last season

to be anything but promise,
but there in the air was white tulip,

marvel, triumph of all flowering, the soul
lifted up, if we could still believe

in the soul, after so much diminishment ...
Breath, from the unpromising waters,

up, across the pond and the two-lane highway,
pure purpose over the dune,

gone. Tomorrow's unreadable
as this shining acreage;

the future's nothing
but this moment's gleaming rim.

Now the tide's begun
its clockwork turn, pouring,

in the day's hourglass,
toward the other side of the world,

and our dependable marsh reappears
-- emptied of that starched and angular grace

that spirited the ether, lessened,
but here. And our ongoingness,

what there'll be of us? Look,
love, the lost world

rising from the waters again:
our continent, where it always was,

emerging from the half-light, unforgettable,
drenched, unchanged.

Mark Doty, 1995

December 1, World AIDS day. Think about it, link it.

There is no Swedish word for the day.

- by Francis S.

On Thursday, the husband and I went to see a friend dance at Kulturhuset.

The performance started off with a cheap but effective trick: One of the dancers came out and told the audience that another dancer had gotten hurt during the rehearsal and there would be no performance. After a bit of jostling and sighing and disappointment and dismay and putting on of scarves and gloves and overcoats, the performance started in earnest.

It certainly raised hopes, dashed them, and then after planning for a minute what one would do with an evening now free, put one in a state of confusion.

I can't say I approve of such patent manipulation, but the dance itself - exhaustingly athletic, funny, witty, breathtaking at times - didn't disappoint.

The Swedish word for the day is förväntningar. It means expectations.

- by Francis S.

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.