Here in Sweden, the talk about America is pretty much only about foreign policy fuck-ups, and the disaster taking place in Iraq. But when I talk to my sainted sister, who works for a foundation in Minneapolis and doles out money for childcare projects for low-income parents, invariably the conversation turns to how awful things are in the States, domestically. Then today I read that the governor of Texas has decided to give rich property owners a tax break, and fund schools with taxes on strip clubs instead of with property taxes. Poetic, isn't it: Sad horny bastards paying five extra bucks every time they go for a gander at some tits and ass, five bucks that then goes to fund the schooling of 10-year-olds. Unfortunately, the upshot of it is that poor and middle class kids are going to be getting less money for their schools, and decades of attempts at trying to distribute education dollars fairly is basically being trashed.

Of course, behind it all is the whole idea that rich people need more tax breaks not just on the federal level, but on the state level as well. And that the federal government shouldn't be subsidizing luxuries like, well, education. Not that education spending on the federal level has ever amounted to much - the budget for education has only ever been a tiny fraction of the military budget, for example - but at least federal monies tended to be aimed at evening the odds for poorer kids. But not anymore. The buck has been passed to the states, and if Texas is any indication, the states aren't ponying up to pay for education either.

So who's going to pay for it? The children of America, that's who.

Poor, divided America.

The Swedish phrase for the day is halva priset. It means half price.

- by Francis S.

The American editor and his wife swept into Stockholm on Wednesday evening at about 11, lugging a good two-hundred pounds worth of luggage for a three-week visit. As we dined last night on a soup of Jerusalem artichokes and cornbread sandwiches, my husband tried to explain the concept of travelling lightly, going without underwear and other space-saving ideas, but the editor's wife just laughed her fizzy laugh.

Unfortunately, their trip has turned out to be an exchange of sorts, since my beloved husband left this morning for a week-long business trip to New York.

Bad planning.

At least I won't be home alone, restless after a couple of hours and vaguely lonely and listening for strange noises at night in bed. It will be strange the first time I sleep alone in this apartment. There are, no doubt, ghosts just waiting for the opportunity to show their grubby faces.

The Swedish word for the day jordärtskocka. It means Jerusalem artichoke.

- by Francis S.

Swans, however elegant they look as they glide in pairs along a canal beside a castle, are nasty creatures. Whoever first came up with the idea of staging Swan Lake with male ballet dancers, all powerful thighs and angry kicking, had the right idea. Still, I was charmed when I sat on the rocks on Birds Island on Easter morning and a swan slowly made his way toward me, keeping a distance but carefully checking me out and then lazily stretching his neck in the sun as he floated some ten meters away in the water as if I'd given him permission to relax, while his poor mate watched from afar.

The Swedish word for the day is Svansjön, which means of course Swan Lake.

- by Francis S.

Easter Vigil

The man in
wolf's disguise
is seen amongst
the cool greenery.

His ever-
roving eyes,
perusing the
naked scenery,

Watch most hushed
for the soft
unhappy and
unseen paschal lamb:

Will he
ecce agnus
today?

Is it
of any use
to stay?

His small hopes, crushed,
soon are borne aloft
and far away;
he doesn't
really give a goddamn.

Or so,
if he could speak,
he'd say.

He pads back into
the shallow thicket,
still hungry but
maliceless,
until another day.

While the sallow lamb -
bearing a ticket
wearing a suit -
boards a train
going the other way.

a poem from 1996

Yes, it's a day early for the Easter Vigil, but we're off to Birds Island in a couple of hours. The first trip out into the archipelago for the year.

The Swedish phrase of the day is här kommer solen. It means here comes the sun.

- by Francis S.

For a city that escaped being bombed into smithereens in World War II, Stockholm has an amazing amount of ugly and boxy functionalist apartment houses and office buildings, most of which have sprouted up since 1945.

Did enterprising Stockholm citizens of 1945 feel the same way about the buildings put up at the turn of the 20th century? And will enterprising Stockholm citizens of 2045 find functionalist architecture more charming than I do now? What exactly is it about older buildings that makes them more pleasing to the eye? Why do I actually go some six blocks out of my way to fill a prescription at The Stork Pharmacy, which is all Jugend-era painted glass ceilings and dark wood finials run amok?

The Swedish word for the day is läkemedel, which means medicine.

- by Francis S.

It's so easy to forget that Sweden is a socialist country. Like the rest of Europe, it's gone through its round of privatizations, American television is ubiquitous, everyone dresses so stylishly (if a bit uniformly). The country just doesn't have that dowdy socialist one-size-fits-all feeling.

Except when it comes to apartments.

The housing system in Stockholm is Byzantine and people are always on the lookout for the perfect apartment to rent or swap or somehow get through various devious methods. It's almost a pathology.

At the same time, Swedes have a particularly strong and distinctly un-American sense that there is such a thing as too big. Especially when it comes to apartments. Basically, everyone should just get his or her fair share, which is small-ish by American standards.

What I'm getting at here is that I now have an apartment that is shamefully big, way more than my share. I equivocate when people ask how big it is, which they invariably do because they seem to be obsessed with the question.

I tell them it's bigger than the old one.

"How big?" they ask.

Big, I say. And then they press some more and then I have to tell them and then I see the judgement in their eyes and then I get all flustered and try to make it sound as if the place is less than it is somehow. I hate this feeling.

This situation would never happen in the States, where people have a certain admiration for big and more and better.

Interestingly, I have probably gone socialist enough that I'm not sure whether I think that this is good or bad, that the sky is the limit in the States, no holds barred. But I obviously haven't gone so socialist that it stopped me from buying this unfairly glorious apartment.

The Swedish word for the day is jämkning, which is the tax adjustment one makes when one gets a tax break for having a loan on a house or apartment.

- by Francis S.

The deed is done. Or rather, it's in our possession. The deed to the new apartment that is. The papers are all signed, so the place is officially ours.

In between signing away the old apartment and signing for the new apartment, the husband and I stopped in a café in Östermalm for a little lunch. Sitting at a table in the back, next to a set of old oven doors in an ancient white-tiled wall, I noticed a secret-service type with one of those plastic spiralled wires twirling from his ear and down his neck and into his collar.

"He must be here with a member of the royal family," said the husband. Or perhaps a governmental minister or something, I added.

Indeed, it turned out to be the former Miss Silvia Sommerlath, now Mrs. Carl G. Bernadotte, better known as the Queen of Sweden. And I never even saw her because it wasn't until after we'd left the place that the husband mentioned that she was sitting at a table with one of her girlfriends, in fact the very same table the hostess had offered to us earlier but we hadn't taken.

The Swedish word for the day is, of course drottningen, which means the queen.

- by Francis S.

I'm back again, just a little bit north of where I was. Exhausted by the move and amazed at how quickly a new place becomes home and an old place soulless and sad when it's empty. It's all the stuff that makes a place home, apparently: Our possessions are what give us comfort. This is my solid American consumer capitalist side talking, no doubt.

And yet again, I make my yearly small numerical change to the biographical information at the left.

The Swedish phrase for the day is saker och ting, which means things or stuff. I think perhaps this has been the phrase of the day before, but I'm too lazy to check.

- by Francis S.

As if the writing hasn't been sparse enough already, for the next three weeks or so it will be even less so. Down to nothing, in fact. There's no time for writing on account of too much packing of books and dishes and things and more things into boxes here at the soon-to-be-left apartment on Bondegatan, and too much cleaning up after the sanding and oiling of floors, the spackling and painting of walls in the new apartment (big enough for a family of six to live comfortably in) at Odenplan. And I don't even have time to describe the concert at Berwaldhallen I went to on Friday in which a piece of music was sort-of premiered and at which I sat in wonder at how the tiny country that is Sweden could manage to create such things and even manage to have some kind of audience for them (even if I was about the youngest person in attendance).

Back soon.

- by Francis S.

Oh, Madrid.

The Swedish phrase for the day is jag beklagar. It means I'm so saddened.

- by Francis S.

After a few beers at Strykjärnet, the restaurant in Stockholm's own miniature version of the Flatiron Building, and a couple of rounds of political discussion and agreeing that despite the sorry state of the U.S. there is possibly some reason for hope, and then a few more beers, the charming Stefan Geens (who is as sharp as his writing) let drop the fact that he is post-national, a man happily bereft of country and a culture that he can call home.

I said that maybe I was, too.

"Nah," he said.

Which I guess means that I am pre-post-national.

I certainly feel as if I have all the benefits already, which would mean not having to feel embarrassed because of the actions of a particular president or prime minister, or somehow responsible for an inane television program that improbably spreads like a virus to the rest of the world. One is an outsider everywhere, a ready excuse for any particular social gaffe one makes - just blame it on not being a Swede, or not living in America anymore.

So, I wonder when exactly I will achieve true post-national status?

The Swedish word for the day is anledning. It means reason or cause.

- by Francis S.

I wonder if Sweden is the first country to have bought the rights to create its own version of That Gay Show.

It has a different name here, of course - Fab 5 - but it's got the same music, the same minivan, the same camera angles, the same shopping bags, the same nervous straight guys.

And yet, it just isn't the same at all.

The Swedish phrase for the day is för tamt, which is how the husband described it. It means too tame.

(We did laugh once or twice.)

- by Francis S.

Apparently, I live in the LoBoToMe area of Stockholm. But not for long.

Stefan Geens, you are too clever by half. And I mean that in the best way.

The Swedish word for the day is kaxig, which means cocky.

- by Francis S.

February 29. A day to remember that everything takes a bit of compromise, that if you don't fudge things around the edges, dire consequences are in store. A day to remember that every four years, we're forced to add a day to prevent summer from becoming winter over the centuries.

I'm definitely a compromiser. Perfectionism is not one of my vices. I believe a thing worth doing is a thing worth doing in mediocre fashion. In fact, no one is likely to notice if each drizzle of red wine sauce is symmetric and that the chicken breast is placed in exactly the same spot on each plate. It's okay to be a centimeter or two or three off, as it will look just as pleasing and taste just as good.

I suppose February 29 is an affirmation of my way of doing things.

The Swedish word for the day is skottdagen. It means, of course, February 29th, although my dictionary translates it as leap day, although I don't recall ever actually using that term; the dictionary also gives a nice Latin term that I've never heard of either - intercalary day.

- by Francis S.

Because he's funny and perceptive and human, because he makes me gasp at his neverending flood of wit, his ability to just knock off post after post of top-notch writing that is introspective without ever crossing the line into indulgence. Because he embodies all that is best about confessional writing. Because he is what differentiates the amateurs from the pros. Because, god only knows why, he wants to hit the Blogdex top 100 list.

Because he's always worth reading, see what Mig has to say today, and take a look at all the various Bug stuff he's got on offer.

The Swedish verb for the day is att beundra. It means to admire.

- by Francis S.

The subway was filled this morning with people carrying shopping bags from the various booksellers in town: Today is the start of Sweden's countrywide yearly book sale, a practice that began in the 1920s when publishers wanted to get rid of remaindered books.

In a land where about 40 percent of the population reads a book for an average of 55 minutes on any given day (according to statistics from the Swedish Writers' Union), this sale is a big thing. But we're not talking huge numbers - in a market of some 9 million Swedish speakers, a book that sells 10,000 copies is a best-seller, more or less.

But, you gotta love a country where a book sale is eagerly awaited by nearly half the population.

Me, I haven't bought a thing. All my money is going to the new apartment.

The Swedish word for the day is förlag. It means publishing house.

- by Francis S.

The most difficult thing about leaving this apartment will be leaving our neighbor the chef behind. At least for me that will be hardest. She's working on a cookbook due out in the fall, and the husband and I are lucky guinea pigs testing, say, four different pasta dishes - asparagus and bacon, roasted broccoli and blue cheese and walnuts, cherry tomatoes sautéed in butter and sugar with sunflower seeds, lentils and orzo with oranges and rucola - or desserts like ice cream sandwiches with toasted gingerbread and clementines in anise syrup.

I don't think she's going to be at all interested in hauling these meals halfway across town just to be nice to us.

(They've finished sanding and oiling the floors; they've now started spackling the walls... we've only a month to go before we move in and whenever I stop by to see how it's going, it feels more and more like home, despite the mess.)

The Swedish word for the day is skrattkammare. It means funhouse.

- by Francis S.

Some people jet from San Francisco to Los Angeles just for lunch. Me, I jet from Stockholm to Helsinki for coffee and a chat with my favorite Finn. Of course jammed in before the coffee (not actual coffee, it was more kind of metaphoric, with a lot of talking) was an interview with a Japanese designer who has worked for Marimekko for the past 30 years.

When I was 13, I was the shit in my striped Marimekko shirts, purchased by my mother at what must have surely been one of the first Crate & Barrel stores, located in a tiny strip mall off Sheridan Road in Winnetka.

It was so oddly nostalgic to be wandering around in an office and factory I'd never been to before, watching them print cloth in patterns that I remember as being the hippest thing when I was a kid.

I got some interesting swag, too: books with some nifty photos of all those familiar patterns in various forms, from bedsheets to beach hats. Amazingly, this stuff has all come back into fashion again and achieved a kind of classic status. Um, I think.

The Swedish word for the day is formgivare. It means designer.

- by Francis S.

I thought I'd left Chicago behind years ago, but we came home from an afternoon birthday party only to find our street blocked off and lit up by klieg lights, a bunch of big old American cars parked here and there, some garbage cans artfully placed beside a restaurant and a Chicago Tribune newspaper dispenser outside the secondhand clothes shop.

It seems I moved to Sweden only to find myself in Chicago again. Even stranger, it's pouring rain on one side of the building, while the courtyard is clear and filled with snow.

(It was those Finnish fun-boys The Rasmus, filming a music video on our narrow street, the Farmer Street, which apparently looks like Chicago to your typical Swedish music video director.)

The Swedish word for the day is stjärnor. It means stars.

- by Francis S.

Most days, I take a lunchtime promenade up one side of a canal, cross a bridge and then walk back down the canal on the other side, which is an island that, if I'm not mistaken, still officially belongs to the king of Sweden (who is currently mired in controversy over remarks he made about Brunei being a sort of paradaisical land of the free and home of the brave, despite the fact that the Sultan of Brunei has absolute power. Of course the Prime Minister is now also in trouble because the government didn't prepare the king properly before the visit, apparently. Unfortunately, I can only find Swedish links to this story, except for this short from Swedish Radio where you have to scroll down a bit.)

There, not far from the Nordic Museum, stands a statue of Jenny Lind in crinoline skirts and crossed ankles, all ladylike with a green patina sitting amidst a little stand of birches. It always makes me so cold to look at her.

The Swedish phrase for the day is in honor of Dong Resin, who invariably makes me laugh out loud: Var finns biblioteket någonstans? It means where is the library?

- by Francis S.

Swedes aren't so big on marriage. They seem to get married only when they really want to make a big statement, say, after a couple has been together for 25 years and their children are grown. Since the laws surrounding common-law-marriage do such a good job of protecting people, including children, there's no legal or social advantage to tying the knot. It's a bigger deal to people, so they don't do it as lightly.

"It's a desire not to make promises you can't keep," says my friend the priest, who was recently quoted in an article in the Baltimore Sun.

But it doesn't mean that people split up any more often than they do in the States, or even that there are more single parents. Yet conservatives still love to point to the high rate of children born out of wedlock in Sweden as an example of the failure of liberal sex education, which is utterly ridiculous - these children's parents aren't married, but they're as together as any married couple in the States.

I've had it with all the rhetoric about marriage.

The Swedish verb for the day is att lova. It means to promise.

by Francis S.

Language amazes me:

In English I can tell my son: "Today I talked to Adrian," and he won't ask: "How do you know you talked to Adrian?" But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something - we call it "evidentiality." I would have to say: "I talked to Adrian, non-visual," if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: "She talked to Adrian, non-visual, reported." In that language, if you don't say how you know things, they think you are a liar.

From an interview with linguistic researcher Alexandra Aikhenvald conducted by Adrian Barnett in the January 31 issue of New Scientist.

So, if the lingua franca of the world were Tariana, what exactly would this mean for George W. Bush and Tony Blair if they had given speeches about attacking Iraq because they had heard that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? I wonder if there are enough suffixes in Tariana to convey believability in this particular case.

The Swedish verb for the day is att överskatta. It means to overestimate.

- by Francis S.

Groundhog day was a mere two days ago, but with the thermometer hovering at nearly 8 degrees celsius, it feels disconcertingly like spring has arrived already in Stockholm.

But in Ohio it's deep and darkest winter for great big homo types like myself: There's nothing quite like a bit of mean-spirited anti-gay legislation to give one the chills. I wonder how many states will follow in Ohio's footsteps?

The Swedish word for the day is baklänges. It means (facing) backwards.

- by Francis S.

As Blogger gives, so give I: at last, a site feed. Over there after the links and before the archives.

- by Francis S.

Less than a hundred years ago, the general public picnicked on the White House lawn whenever it wanted to.

Apparently, the general public can still picnic on the lawns of the various royal residences of Sweden. You can even wander aimlessly on the grounds of, say, Uriksdal Palace late on a Sunday evening, in the dead of winter, clutching a bottle of champagne and searching desperately for the greenhouses where a birthday party is going on.

Amazing.

The Swedish word for the day is trädgård. It means garden.

- by Francis S.

Yesterday, I was reading in the latest issue of Wired Magazine about how all these Silicon-Valley types are all hot and bothered because hi-tech jobs are being outsourced to bright young engineering geeks in India. Then, today I read that the state of Georgia has removed the term "evolution" from its recommended education curriculum guidelines (and thereby its achievement exams) - joining a handful of other states, according to the New York Times.

I think that companies across the United States should just give up now and start investing in Indian education, because the U.S. graduating class of 2014 is going to be a generation of idiots.

The Swedish word for the day is vetenskap. It means science.

- by Francis S.

Before I forget, at the popularity contest that is The Bloggies, the voting booths are soon to be shut down. In the category of "Best Great Big Homo Blog," I recommend voting for a girl called Irk, a.k.a. Swirlspice.

The Swedish word for the day is priset. It means the prize and the price, causing endless confusion for Swedes using the two words in English.

- by Francis S.

The Countess of Castiglione was a sort of Paris Hilton of the Second Empire. Except instead of scandals involving videotaped sex and starring in a television show where rich girls slop the pigs á la Marie-Antoinette, the countess seduced Napoleon III and horrified Paris by wearing costumes with no underwear. Obsessed with clothes and, when she was young, making a scene wherever she happened to be, she was probably a bit vapid. I'm talking about the countess here. But she did one lasting thing: she had a photograph taken of herself that is undoubtedly the most enigmatic of all early photographic portraits, in which she is holding an empty oval frame up to her eye.

The picture evokes so many thoughts and questions about the nature of looking and being looked at. I've been baffled and taken in by that photograph ever since I first saw it in a book, when I was 20.

The Swedish word for the day is grevinnan. It means, of course, the countess.

- by Francis S.

When I was a kid, girls still had real muffs.

Sure, they were covered in some kind of strange white fake fur, and they didn't really have that Anna- Karenina- jumping- in- front- of- a- train glamour that I associate with a good muff, but they were honest to goodness muffs. Now, the only time you see a muff is on some matron promenading about Östermalm in a full-length mink.

I wonder if the demise of a once common item of attire is due to the fact that the name has become synonymous with female genitalia?

And, don't you hate it when perfectly good words, like, um, gay for instance, get co-opted by fanatics and end up meaning something sick and disgusting?

The Swedish word for the day is tantig. It means little old ladyish.

- by Francis S.

I was a, um, postmature baby. One month late.

"I must have counted wrong, of course," my mother said. "But at the time I thought 'isn't this baby ever going to come?'"

Strange that it took her 42 years to tell me.

"Once it's past, you sort of forget about it," she explained on the phone, not half an hour ago.

So I guess I can start acting postmature now. Which is sort of like postmodern, only with a bit less ornamentation.

The Swedish word for the day is pondus. I've always felt the best way to translate it is, more or less, with the word gravitas.

- by Francis S.

What could be a more perfect role for reclusive writer Thomas Pynchon than playing himself, complete with a paperbag over his head, on "The Simpsons"? (item stolen from a blog on my referrer logs that I somehow can't find again; thanks, whoever you are.)

It seems, somehow, disingenuous of Pynchon.

And yet, if I were offered the chance to play myself on "The Simpsons," whoo-ee. Just ask me. Playing opposite Homer is a sure mark of über-success.

The Swedish phrase for the day is Gravitationens Regnbåge, which means, of course, Gravity's Rainbow.

- by Francis S.

Why is it that big old otherwise well-adjusted girly-men like myself are so insecure, deep down, about whether we're manly enough?

I ran into the husband's ex-girlfriend this morning and she said, "You look so, um, masculine."

I was so proud of myself. I thought, wow, I sure have you fooled.

Pathetic, and yet I can't help it.

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

- by Francis S.

I've changed from being a subway person to being a bus person. And I thought it was the kind of thing that one was for life, sort of like being left-handed or right-handed.

It's purely a matter of convenience: the bus gets me to work and back faster and with less legwork than the subway. The downside is that I can't read, the upside is that there is actual scenery, even if it is the same scenery every day.

I still haven't figured out the queue system, though. As far as I can tell, there isn't one. And so I end up being one of the first to board the bus every time because when I get to the bus stop, I stand where I know the bus doors will open. No one has even given me a dirty look, so I guess I'm not making a faux pas. Still, it seems too easy somehow to be one of the people to manage to get a seat and not have to stand in the aisle, desperately holding onto the closest strap or pole.

The Swedish phrase for the day is kommunikation, which means, among other things, transportation.

- by Francis S.

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.

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.

Imagine that Santa Claus were gay. Imagine that he was thirty years younger, that he was completely bald and he'd shaved off his beard leaving a five o'clock shadow, that he wore only black, that his ho-ho-ho's were a good octave higher. Imagine that when he was a little boy, he used to come with his grandmother into Stockholm every other year when she would trade in her old furs and be fitted for new ones, watching her surrounded by furriers and loving every minute of the experience. Imagine that he knew more about style than Tyler Brulé, put together.

Imagine if Santa were fabulous, and you get some idea of what J. is like, living in Stockholm again for the first time in seven years and regaling us at a dinner party last night with stories about bringing an entire fashion photo shoot entourage out for a night to a Manhattan strip club that specializes in an act that involves a pool table and a bunch of Hispanic go-go boys - "The director thought it was fabulous and decided we must do a shoot with a model in a bikini lying on the pool table with all the boys around her, in their shorts of course..." - and telling us how all receptionists think his name is Fiona when he calls - "Well, everyone I work with knows it's me when the receptionist says that there's a Fiona on the phone. I wish my voice was as deep as my mother's..." and finally, giving us the lowdown on working in Turkey with some model who is the biggest thing there, at least that's what she says - "We were at this resort where only Turkish people go and we would be walking down the street and she would say 'Take my arm, J. You want to be in Turkish gossip papers, yes? Is good for your career in Turkey!' and sure enough, there would be a million paparazzi taking our picture. The worst was when we were sitting out at a restaurant, her in one of the many outfits she wore each day, smiling at the cameras while I was stuffing myself with a hamburger and french fries. Yeah, that will be great for my career in Turkey, pictures of me all over the gossip papers, stuffing myself with a hamburger."

The Swedish phrase for the day is långt bortifrån. It means from a long way off.

- by Francis S.

Observations that deserved a write-up over the past week, but there just wasn't the time.

Item: You know how oysters are the culinary embodiment of the sea, an ocean reduced to a mouthful? Well, I think chantarelle mushrooms are the culinary embodiment of the forest, all earthy, musty, perfumey goodness.

Item: This past February, my parents were due to take a month-long trek to Ecuador and Peru, but my father broke his ankle and the trip was postponed until September, at which time my parents duly went and as they walked down some canyon near the eco-resort they were staying at in the middle of the mountains a five-hour drive from Quito, my mother broke her ankle. Apparently, there is some ankle curse associated with Ecuador and Peru that I was previously unaware of.

Item: Swedish horse chestnuts are as comforting to look at and palm as the American horse chestnuts of my boyhood in suburban Chicago.

Item: If you're going to steal someone's identity, it pays to do a little research beforehand.

The Swedish phrase for the day is tyvärr inte. It means I'm afraid not.

- by Francis S.

Did you know that both the mayor of Berlin and the mayor of Paris are gay?

I think New York should be next. How about Choire Sicha, Gawker's new editor, as the next mayor of New York? He's already the president of New York, and I don't think being mayor should necessarily be a step down, if he can find the time with his busy new schedule.

The Swedish word for the day is skvallerspalt, which means gossip column.

- by Francis S.

Over the weekend, A., the assistant director, worked for the BBC translating and making phonecalls and handling anything that required a knowledge of Swedish for the barrage of reporters sent over to report on the euro referendum.

In the middle of it all, she rang me up. I'd been expecting her to call me up at some point to ask some extremely arcane question about the English language.

"Well, I'm here with the BBC," she said, breathless. "It's so exciting. You can't believe how noisy they all are, they are so loud. Thank god I have a pad of paper. I just walk back and forth quickly, writing, and everyone thinks I'm doing something extremely important. I think it would be so much fun to work with the news."

She had no arcane questions about the English language.

I should hear more behind-the-scenes gossip when we go to the theater on Friday, A. and me and the husband and C., the fashion photographer.

The Swedish word for the day is suveränt. It means superb.

- by Francis S.

As I sat waiting for the subway train at the Karlaplan station, the businessman sitting next to me - dark, handsome, very pointy shoes, conservative grey suit - offered me a chocolate marshmellow cookie.

"It's more fun when you share," he said, smiling at me.

No, but thanks anyway, I told him, grinning ear-to-ear.

The Swedish word for the day is vänlig. It means friendly.

- by Francis S.

I'm teaching myself the words to the Swedish national anthem - Du Gamla, Du Fria - but it was easier to learn the words of the drinking song I taught myself this summer after hearing it sung at midsummer:

Jag är en liten undulat
som får för dåligt med mat,
för dem jag bor hos,
för dem jag bor hos,
de är så snåla.

De ger mig sill varenda dag,
men det vill jag inte ha,
jag vill ha brännvin,
jag vill ha brännvin,
och gorganzola.

(I'm a little parakeet,
who gets bad food,
because the people I live with
are so stingy.

They give me herring every day,
but I don't want to have that,
I want vodka
and gorganzola.)

The Swedish word for the day is snapsvisor. It means drinking songs. The second Swedish word for the day is valvaka. It means sitting up to watch the election results come in, as in, for instance, a referendum on whether to join the European monetary unit.

- by Francis S.

As New York and the rest of America woke up to its own day of mourning and memory on September 11, I had begun my morning six hours earlier in Stockholm after a bad night’s sleep. Because on September 10 at 4:15 in the afternoon, Sweden’s popular foreign minister Anna Lindh had been stabbed viciously while shopping at Nordiska Kompaniet, Stockholm’s grandest department store. A heavyset man with bad skin and dressed in grey sweatshirt and baseball cap had slashed her arm and cut her deeply in the abdomen and chest.

As a passport-bearing Swedish citizen of less than three months, the shock I felt was more than I expected – after all, I haven’t yet been able to untangle the knotty political system, with its seven major parties and sometimes bizarre alliances. But I did know who Anna Lindh was, with her ready smile and blonde bob, always in the thick of things and the most credible banner-bearer for the yes-side in Sweden’s referendum on whether to jettison the crown and replace it with the euro.

As I went to bed that night, Lindh was still under the surgeon’s knife and in critical condition, being tended to by more than 30 doctors and surgeons.

Then at 8:45 in the morning on September 11, Prime Minister Göran Persson announced at a press conference that after more than 10 hours of surgery, Lindh had died at 5:29 a.m. He was barely able to keep his composure. She was, as the Swedish press now writes, his chosen crown princess and the politician most likely to succeed him as prime minister. But she was closer to people’s hearts than merely being a possible future leader of the country. Swedes were proud of Anna Lindh, because she represented Sweden to the outside world just as they wished the outside world to see them: She was ready with a smile but strong, not afraid to take on the foreign ministers of the larger countries of the European Union, while at the same time an ordinary mother of two young sons, and a wife. She showed to the world a picture of Sweden that Swedes treasure: a progressive country that sticks to its principles, a country that is down-to-earth, that is tough without being violent.

But her assassination brings up the issue of violence in ways few other acts can. The country is questioning its open system, and wondering how the assassin could have escaped so easily in the middle of a crowded department store in the afternoon. It dredges up painful memories of the still-unsolved murder in 1987 of Prime Minister Olof Palme.

I dearly hope that this doesn't signal a change in security policy, the end of an open Sweden. Making a country more secure is impossible, it only worsens the quality of life for everyone and those who want to commit acts of violence still will commit them, they just have to try harder.

We cried, the husband and I, and we lit a candle for Anna Lindh, letting it burn down to nothing by the end of the evening.

I can think of no appropriate Swedish word for the day.

- by Francis S.

Sweden's foreign minister, Anna Lindh, has been stabbed and seriously wounded. It happened in NK, Stockholm's grand department store.

I'm a bit in shock.

It is no doubt because of her support for the euro. And this undoubtedly, despite the intent of the person who stabbed her (whom they haven't found yet) will help the yes side in the referendum on whether or not to join the European monetary unit.

The Swedish word for the day is oro. It means anxiety.

- by Francis S.

Leni Riefenstahl, everyone's favorite Nazi film director, is dead.

I've never been too keen on the image rehabilitation of history's villains. Especially self-rehabilitation. Take Leni, for example. She never owned up to doing anything wrong, not really. And while her guilt is problematic - she claimed she never joined the Nazi party, her great films were made before the war broke out - I find it hard not to be repulsed by her and her art, no matter how brilliant.

The Swedish phrase for the day is fräls oss ifrån ondo. It means deliver us from evil.

- by Francis S.

No one's ever been able to adequately explain, confirm or deny a gut feeling that I've had, although last night the policeman tried hard, but we just didn't have enough time (that, and his 10-month-old daughter, my god-daughter, was shamelessly flirting with me and I really couldn't resist allowing myself to be distracted by her little seven-toothed grin):

In the U.S., I'm pretty much your run-of-the-mill pinko faggot. I believe that aspiring to be more like Sweden would do the U.S. a lot of good, as opposed to aspiring to be like, uh, say, Queen Victoria's British Empire, on which the sun never set and which seems to be just one of several models for the current administration in the White House.

But Sweden can't aspire to be more like Sweden.

I'm so used to the uphill battle in the U.S. for a more progressive society, it feels somehow wrong to be in the majority even if the majority believes, for the most part, in what I believe in.

Have I been wrong all these years, and it turns out I'm merely a contrarian?

And the gut feeling I haven't been able to shake is that it's possible that the right in Sweden plays the role that the left plays in the U.S.

I wish I could explain it better so someone could give me an answer.

On Sunday, I'll go with the husband to cast my vote on whether to trade the crown for the euro, and then we'll sit and watch the returns of the referendum at a small party at the apartment of the priest and policeman.

I don't understand Swedish politics, not at all.

The Swedish word for the day is ogräs. It literally means un-grass, but the proper translation would be weed.

- by Francis S.

I always think it will be fun to have some chunks of serious time to myself, to do whatever I want. But when it actually happens, inevitably I eat utter crap, I'm bored after an hour or two and don't know what to do with myself yet I manage to stay up to an ungodly hour.

The husband is in Spain, and I'm baching it.

The Swedish word for the day is öken. It means desert.

And sorry about the lack of comments. I tried to install a new commenting system, but it just fucked the template, but good. So I regret to say that there probably won't be any commenting possibilities until Sept. 8. In the meantime, feel free to send me e-mail if you simply must say something. I promise to reply.

- by Francis S.

Some modern dance takes all its energy from the earth - feet rising and thighs pounding, all muscle. But Akram Khan's dancing belongs to the type of modern dance that seems to be pulled from the ether, all fingers in the air pulling invisible threads and writing elaborate script, hands snapping against bodies with heiroglyphic gestures. Tonight at Dansens Hus, there was also a short actressy interval where one of the dancers writhed about on the stage, and then another brief moment where Akram Khan rolled his head in his arms like some kind of kinesthetic Henry Moore.

I've never cared much for ballet - it's too fussy and precise for me - but I do like modern dance. Like good poetry, good dance can be appreciated without interpretation.

It did hurt to watch, the fierceness of it.

Then again, the pain may have something to do with my starting training at the gym for the first time in my life yesterday. My poor aching legs, I'm walking around like a little old man.

The Swedish word for the day is ball. It means super or great.

- by Francis S.

The dancefloor was so packed it was certainly a fire hazard, and there was no way anyone could dance except by swaying in place. Not that people had come there to dance particularly. They'd mostly come to the bar up at Mosebacke at the Södrateatern to hear the R&B star give a concert for 200 or so of her closest friends.

I'm more of a Bach cantata kind of guy, but I was moving and swaying and clapping and singing along with the best of them. There's something about a live concert that hits me smack dab in the solar plexus of my soul, even if I had to strain to see over the big heads of the three guys standing in a line in front of me.

The R&B star even invoked the husband's name in the middle of one of the verses of her latest hits.

I was sweaty with pride, dripping all over the poor woman in front of me.

Then A., the assistant director, was suddenly kissing me and whispering in my ear. Some guy in a hat with grabby hands was putting the moves on her. "Pretend you're my boyfriend," she whispered frantically, trying to laugh in an intimate fashion which just turned into real laughter because it didn't seem to do much good. Me, I had no problem pretending that I was the consort of the most beautiful woman in the room. We great big homos have a great appreciation of gorgeousness, not to mention a penchant for being a beard.

The guy left after a couple of minutes, unable to either score with A. or score a better spot to see the stage.

The Swedish word for the day is gubbsjuk. It is a phrase that doesn't have a nice clean one-word translation, but is an adjective referring to someone who's a dirty old man.

- by Francis S.

They arrived with wedding dresses in their arms, and shopping bags full of white shoes with precipitous heels, and real jewels worth tens of thousands.

Just an ordinary dinner, chez Francis Strand.

I suggested that we each wear one of the dresses while we ate, but no one seemed to care for the idea, especially not the haute couturier, who had designed the dresses in question. And the husband and C., the fashion photographer, who had spent the day taking pictures of models wearing the dresses, seemed singularly disinterested in them.

It was 9 p.m. when we finally sat down to eat - A., the assistant director had been slaving away in the kitchen on a new recipe she'd found for salmon crusted in carrots and sesame seeds.

"You know what?" said O., the 16-year-old daughter of C., smiling invitingly at the haute couturier, "you should design the clothes for a costume drama."

And of course, you would star in it, said O.'s father.

"Well, yes," said O. "I am an actress and I have to think of these things."

We all laughed, and I thought about how at 42, I still have the same kinds of hopes and dreams for myself. Rather along the lines of writing a wildly successful novel. Or something like that. But looking around the table, it was hard to ignore the fact that the rest of the adults had already achieved success on a public scale.

I wonder how old I'll be before I give up?

Before they all left, somebody pulled out the tiara with real diamonds. It glittered wickedly. No one dared put it on his or her head.

The Swedish word for the day is äkta. It means authentic.

- by Francis S.

It was me and the beautiful people, all of us drinking too-sweet pink or blue drinks and Veuve Clicquot, eating tiny sandwiches and puff pastry with gorgonzola and lamb sausages with figs and bread with tapenade, all of us looking at one another, everyone very much on display and the room as noisy as a birdcage in a zoo. It was a party of sorts in honor of my husband's great friend, the haute couturier, complete with models forcing their way through the crowd before making turns up on a dais, a Finnish violinist, and a pop band (we left before they hit the stage, however).

Everyone there was a fashionista of one sort or another, even A., the assistant director: Her modelling days in Paris may be over, but she still sets the style, standing like a madonna in Manolo Blahniks and a bluejean skirt and trying to convince me to give her the bracelet they gave me when I came in the door, which could be redeemed for a surprise present that was bound to be makeup or some other girly thing.

The husband had dressed me beforehand in careful non-style (I had almost made the grave error of wearing the type of crinkly linen shirt that all the non-fashionistas of Stockholm are wearing these days) and as we stood in line waiting to have them check to see that our names were on the list before letting us in to the party, I was ever so thankful I have someone to arbite my taste for me. And to think, before I moved to Stockholm I used to think I had a sense of style.

"You see why we never go to these things?" the husband said to me, looking so very handsome standing next to me in his suit.

Yes, indeed, I told him, I did see. And was it tacky of me to be eating little sandwiches at the same time I happened to have a little packet of snuff stuffed in a corner of my mouth?

"No," he said. "You're just being Swedish."

The Swedish word for the day is kille. It means guy, as in just an ordinary guy.

- by Francis S.

New York is one of the great cities for grand experiences on the cheap. Not to say that you can't have a great time and spend wads of cash, but the fact is you can have as much fun for nearly nothing. A few favorites of mine when I was at university in Manhattan in the mid-eighties were dim sum in Chinatown or kasha and varnishkes at any of a number of Ukrainian restaurants in the East Village. A ride on the Staten Island ferry or a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

But it sounds like these days the Brooklyn Bridge may not be such a good idea.

O, the perils of a deteriorating infrastructure.

Poor New York.

The Swedish word for the day is expedit. It means cashier.

- by Francis S.