Do you think that the Roman soldiers who crossed the Rubicon with Julius Caesar in 49 B.C. realized they were witnessing something that would be remembered 2000 years later? Or what about the audience at the Globe theater in London in 1599 watching Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for the first time?

It makes me wonder whether I've witnessed anything that will be remembered 2000 years from now. I have my doubts. I'm not sure whether I've even been an eyewitness to any of the more minor pivotal events of my lifetime.

There was the 1987 March on Washington, in which I remember strutting past the White House and chanting "2-4-6-8, Ronnie thinks his son is straight." Then there was the time when I happened to be looking out my office window overlooking Connecticut Ave. in Washington, and I saw Gorbachev's motorcade stop amidst a huge crowd of people, an impromptu security nightmare no doubt, and Gorbachev shake the hands of all those adoring Washingtonians.

Could Stephen Spinella's performance in Angels in America, (when the angel came down, it was heart-stopping), or Mark Morris dancing with great wit in Dido and Aeneas be treasured past my own lifetime and memory?

What are the grand and defining moments of our age anyway?

The Swedish word for the day is sekel. It means century.

- by Francis S.

It hasn't been proven yet in humans (apparently there's a problem in finding volunteer subjects), but scientists have suspected for awhile now that if you're willing to half-starve yourself and swear off sugar, you could live to be very, very old. They're not entirely sure why this is.

But I don't get it. Doesn't half-starving mean, well, half-dead? And frankly, who wants to live in a world without rhubarb pie?

The Swedish word for the day is efterrätt. It means dessert.

- by Francis S.

"The world's his oyster, with an R in every month." (My favorite line of Cary Grant's in The Philadelphia Story, because it's so goofy and because I didn't understand it when I first saw it when I was 13 or so.)

One of the consolations of the return of months with an R, is eating mussels (steamed in wine with garlic, thyme and butter) and french fries.

The Swedish word for the day is citat. It means quote.

- by Francis S.

Firewood. As of Friday, we've got a great big stack of it, maybe even a cord (one of those measures I've always wondered about that turns out to be a pile 4 by 4 by 8 feet, which sounds much more exact than it could possibly be). We've been burning it as if it were freezing and the furnace was on the blink, sitting on the living room sofa and staring aimlessly into the fire, telling each other how lovely it is to have a fireplace at last and getting up periodically to poke and prod and fan the flames.

Think, I said to the husband, of what it must've been like in this apartment all winter when they had to keep fires going in seven tile stoves (now long gone).

"That's what they had maids for," he said.

I wonder if they used wood, or coal, I said.

"Wood I think," he said.

I'm not so sure about that, but whatever they used, it must've taken a lot more than a cord of wood. Where do you think they kept it all?

(Which brings me to a stupid thing I loved to irritate my brothers and sister with when we were young, repeating to them endlessly "there's something nasty in the woodshed, there's something nasty in the woodshed" for no reason, no reason at all.)

The Swedish word for the day should be ved, which means wood, but it's not. Instead, it's eventuellt, which although it looks like it should mean eventually, does not. It means possibly, more or less.

- by Francis S.

In 1973, a really cool movie called American Graffiti hit the theaters. At least I thought it was cool when I was 12. It evoked an earlier age of innocence, when the music was all golden oldies and people dressed dopey and the cars were great boxy boats. That would be the year 1962, some 11 years previous.

Some 11 years previous to now is 1993. I can't imagine feeling that kind of easy nostalgia for 1993. Things barely look as if they've changed to me, hair-, clothes-, car-wise. Of course maybe it's just that I'm getting old and unable to read cultural markers anymore, and the cultural shift between 1962 and 1973 wasn't any greater than the current cultural shift. Hell, maybe someone is already working on a movie to make people long for 1993 as an age of innocence and quaint habits.

Come to think of it, there have been planes crashing into buildings, a "war on terror" has begun which is somehow supposed to be connected to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, unemployment is high, the national debt is astronomical, the rest of the world despises the U.S. and the social contract has all but been done in.

It seems like there should be a big shift, but I can't feel it. Maybe our culture was past its sell-by date already in 1993?

The Swedish phrase for the day is beträd ej gräsmattan. It means keep off the grass!

- by Francis S.

Various entities are wondering about a decidedly lesbian-ish blog supposedly belonging to Maya Keyes, daughter of Illinois Senate candidate Alan Keyes, who blasted U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, Mary, for being a lesbian (links courtesy Queerday, natch). Is it real or a hoax?

Me, I wonder how many blogs are in fact not what they appear to be.

For example, Mig, who tries to convince us all that he is a vaguely shy, self-deprecating, funny, angst-prone middle aged expat who is learning to play the cello, is in fact a 17-year-old St. Louis school girl with a 240 IQ, a penchant for Cheever, an encyclopedic knowlege of Austria, a desire to somehow manufacture the understanding father she never had, and is learning to play the cello.

Jeong-A is not a charming globe-trotting Korean lawyer who just quit her job in Hong Kong, but is actually a middle-aged Australian professor of semantics whose wife left him because he spends all his time chatting on the computer with what he thinks are young women, but are in fact middle-aged men like himself posing as young women.

Eeksy Peeksy doesn't live in Poland. He is in fact the PhD thesis of a University of Iowa writing workshop soon-to-be graduate. Marn is the group project of a sociology class at McGill University. Andrew Sullivan is a libertarian "branding" experiment gone haywire (well, maybe you've actually seen pictures of him, or even the man himself, but that doesn't mean anything).

And Zeke, who pretends to be a comfortingly neurotic guy who's ended up after eight years away, living back at home with his parents and taking over his father's company (does it sound like a sitcom, or what? Everybody Loves Zeke) is actually, um, a comfortingly neurotic guy who's ended up after eight years away, living back at home with his parents and taking over his father's company.

Okay, people. It's confession time. Get in that line. Step up to the little wooden cubicle, speak into the grate. Who are you really?

The Swedish word for the day is sanningen. It means the truth.

- by Francis S.

The Swedish phrase for the day is chokladbrulé med hallon. It means chocolate crème brûlée with raspberries.

Before she left for the Gothenburg Book Fair last week, our former neighbor, L., the chef, sent over a copy of her cookbook. Complete with recipes for, among other things, chocolate crème brûlée with raspberries, plus dangerously enticing photos and a nice inscription to us, (we even merited a mention in the credits).

Sadly, as we are no longer neighbors, our days of being recipe guinea pigs are over as there don't seem to be any chefs living in the apartment building on Odenplan.

- by Francis S.

Ten years ago today, the huge ferry Estonia sank in the Baltic, taking with her more than 800 Swedes, Estonians and other folk.

In a small country like Sweden, I guess it's no surprise that nearly all of my friends know at least one person who died that night.

The Swedish phrase for the day is vad har hänt?. It means what's happened?

- by Francis S.

First it was the little bronze man on Karlavägen. Now his horse and wagon chariot-thing is missing as well, plus a bunch of rusty iron silhouettes at Ericsbergsparken have disappeared, leaving a solitary flat figure and flat dog.

Is it thievery or maintenance? Or is there a statue shepherd on the loose, herding the statues of Stockholm to some distant place where they can live the rest of their statue lives with others of their species - happy but segregated - instead of being stuck out in inclement weather being fondled inappropriately by random children and adults, and being shit on by birds?

The Swedish phrase for the day is vi skiter i det. It literally means something like we shit on it, but a better translation would be we'll forget about that, more or less.

- by Francis S.

The night bus that runs from the far suburbs into the city is full of desperately glad teenagers and powdered and rouged little old ladies in low heels and glassy-eyed immigrants under the influence of something untoward and lesbians with toy poodles. Everyone seems secretly worried that if they look back, they'll turn into pillars of salt, or be sent back to hell, or have to live the rest of their lives under the unnatural lights of the bus, or that something else nasty and epic and biblical will happen. I certainly felt that way, my legs all tense, my arms crossed tightly across my chest, talking in a low voice with the husband every now and then as I looked out the window, full of wist.

We'd just been to dinner for the birthday of the husband's nephew.

I merely let loose a tremendous sigh of relief when we got to Odenplan, deciding that the ground was too filthy even for me to kiss.

I think I was around 12 or 13 when I realized that I was meant to live in the city, any city in fact. (Well, maybe not any city, although surely Houston or Phoenix or Orlando don't really count as cities anyway, they're just sprawl.)

I'm a terrible snob when it comes to cities.

The Swedish word for the day is förort. It means suburb.

- by Francis S.

Chatting over drinks at Tranan with the engaging and erudite Stefan Geens - beers for me, vodka lime for him - I seemed to get my mojo back, bloggerly speaking (blojo definitely does not conjure up the right images, so I won't try for any neologisms here). I felt downright born again. Though he might deny it, and it probably isn't intentional, the man is an evangelist. He's got plans, and he was talking all about New York blog cliques (for good and bad), and that he's changed his mind about thinking that it is silly and contrary to the medium for bloggers to meet in person, and that it would probably be better if George W. Bush got re-elected so he could really make things so bad that Americans would be cured of their penchant for the right wing (well, he admitted maybe it wouldn't be so good for Americans and a few random Muslim countries in the short run, plus there is always the possibility that it could cause irreparable damage supreme court-wise, for instance).

Talking politics was fun, of course, but I'm usually not into meta-thinking when it comes to blogging. But it got me chewing on how this huge public writing phenomenon will evolve, seeping into god only knows what parts of our lives, individually and collectively.

Agog with it, I felt like Tom Hulce in that scene in Animal House where he smokes pot for the first time and he's doing the "whole universe in an atom of my fingernail" routine.

Then again, the next day I realized it wears me out to think of all this stuff, and it humbles me to have to face the fact that my own intellect is rather sad, small and flabby. I guess I'll just leave it to the big brains.

The Swedish verb of the day is att tröttna. It means to tire of.

- by Francis S.

Sweden is pretty tame when it comes to natural disasters: no tornadoes or hurricanes or monsoons, no tidal waves or uncontrollable forest fires or volcanoes. There is the occasional flood, but that seemed to be about it as far as I could see.

How wrong I was.

Today, southern Sweden was rocked (well, maybe rocked is too strong a word, lightly shaken?) by an earthquake - the epicenter was in Kaliningrad. According to Dagens Nyheter, it was the strongest quake in Sweden in 100 years.

I guess there just is no security in this world.

The Swedish verb for the day is att skaka. It means to shake.

- by Francis S.

For lunch, I met a friend and former co-worker whom I hadn't seen in six months. She'd gone from blonde to brunette (gentlemen may prefer blondes, but she's more into the rugged he-man type) and I almost didn't recognize her. At Grodan, we spent too much of our lunch bitching about the current state of the U.S. and not enough on gossip. Probably because she already had all the gossip from the office, and I seem to be totally lacking in imagination these days. My creativity is all pure consumption - books about imaginary places are a favorite, or movies.

(Which reminds me, Bad Education is the usual Almodóvar feast: what should be desperate, sensational and lurid is moving instead, filling me with longing and hope. There was even a little boy singing "Moon River" in Spanish with a priest theatrically miming an accompaniament on guitar, and two of the main characters went to see La Bête Humaine as part of an alibi. And current "It" Boy Gael Garcia Bernal pays his dues in high heels and takes it up the ass like a man.)

The Swedish word for the day is raggmunk, which is a potato pancake, which Grodan prepares to perfection, served with lingon and thick bacon.

- by Francis S.

As if to make up for the fact that Sweden tends to get Hollywood dreck six months after the States and the rest of Europe, Almodóvar's latest movie, Bad Education, is premiering here tonight, two months before it's due to premier in New York. And the husband and I got our invitations today in the mail (after a close call in which we almost missed out on the opportunity) to see it tonight at 9 p.m., a week or so before it opens to the general public in the theaters of Stockholm.

I'm shivering in anticipation.

Will it continue the trend of being even better than the last one?

(Almodóvar, besides being hot shit, holds a special place in my heart as being, albeit indirectly, responsible for my living in Sweden. In short, it was first seeing Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown with the incomparable Carmen Maura and the outlandish Rossy de Palma and all those red-hot, pink-hot and orange-hot colors and emotions that Almodóvar paints Spain with that made me think that I had to go to Spain, and years later, it was when I was living in Barcelona that I met the husband.)

The Swedish phrase for the day has to be dålig uppfostran, which is how they've translated the title of the movie. I would translate it as bad upbringing rather than bad education, however. I could be wrong about that - what do you think, native Swedish speakers?

- by Francis S.

Some cultures don't care much for candles - the Spanish associate them with churches and death, it seems. But here, lighted candles are the embodiment of coziness, which is the highest state of being in the Swedish psyche.

It's candle weather again. The sun is setting earlier and earlier, autumn is bearing down with winter at its heels, and there's nothing cozier than candles burning everywhere in the apartment.

The Swedish word for the day is mörk. It means dark.

- by Francis S.

As the bus turned onto Birger Jarlsgatan, we passed a man on a motorcycle with a little wire-haired terrier, complete with leather bomber hat, sitting in between the man's legs.

"Det var kul," the mother sitting in front of me turned back to me and said. Which means that was nice.

Meanwhile, back in America, instead of cute dogs on motorcycles, you get chilling irony. Does anyone else find it incredulous that the same president who created a Department of Homeland Security [sic] has also, along with a republican congress, allowed a ban on assault weapons to lapse? Isn't homeland security supposed to be about America not being a source of weapons for terrorists, let alone, um, alienated teenagers aching to go on a rampage through their local high school?

The Swedish verb for the day is att garva. It means to laugh hysterically.

- by Francis S.

Almost exactly 25 years ago, I packed a suitcase full of clothes, a stereo and an electric typewriter into my parents' sad little white Vega hatchback, and my younger brother drove me the four hours it took to get to university. It was time to become an adult, which I sort of did, but not right away.

I was horribly lonely in that vast dormitory those first weeks, stuck with an indifferent but vaguely boorish roommate and his indifferent and vaguely boorish friends, who talked about sex in sneering and smutty fashion, no doubt in part because none of them had ever managed to actually do anything more than a bit of frantic groping in a car somewhere. I was a skinny little wimp with braces still (I didn't get them removed until the end of the year), and unbeknownst to them a queer boy as well, but I was far more experienced than they were when it came to girls.

Within the first couple weeks, I found my friends and had little to do with my roommate, and by Christmas I no longer even slept in my dorm room but instead spent all my nights with a much older man - 27! - who had already taught elementary school for five years and was there at university just for a year, getting a masters in education degree.

My roommate was mystified, I think. However, at some point over the winter, he read some of the letters I'd gotten from one of my high school sweethearts (the one who was a guy, not the one who was a girl, natch) and figured the whole thing out. In a sort of revenge, he ruined my electric typewriter that my parents had bought me as a high school graduation present. I never said anything to him, but rather in passive aggressive fashion, I told all my friends what he'd done, and they more or less joined me in despising him.

The next year, Milena Maglic and I claimed we were married so that we wouldn't have to stay in the dorm and instead lived in a roomy and cheerful and dirty apartment where we walked around naked and laughed and fought like mad dogs.

It's been 25 years, but I still don't feel like I'm an adult exactly and all I can wonder is, where has the time gone and how long does it take?

The Swedish word for the day is utveckling. It means development.

- by Francis S.

"Heterosexuality isn't normal, it's just common."

said by Dorothy Parker, who used to answer the phone with "What fresh hell is this?"

The Swedish word for the day is oss. It means us.

- by Francis S.

Apparently, Paris is full of holes left by those excavating Romans - Lutetia they called the place - and these holes have been built over, naturally, leaving all kinds of tunnels and caverns, like the catacombs for instance.

Now they've discovered a fully equipped modern movie theater decorated with mystical symbols in one these holes. When they came back a second time to check it out, the power had been cut and there was a note: "Do not try to find us."

It's Phantom of the Opera meets the Da Vinci Code.

Don't you love it when life imitates, um, "art"?

The Swedish phrase for the day is underjorden. It means the underworld.

- by Francis S.

The man - about the size and shape of a piece of firewood with stray branches someone forgot to snap off, only made of bronze - is missing from his place on Karlavägen. He used to be standing behind an equally rough and firewood-like horse of bronze. I could never tell if he was supposed to be a farmer with a wagon, or a charioteer with a racehorse. But now he's gone, and the horse is just standing there by itself, looking twitchy and half-baked.

Wouldn't you know it, the husband is gone, too. A week in Spain, family matters and a bit of business to take care of as well. And I just realized that I actually agreed to let him go off with three of the four pairs of mutual jeans we own, as if he'll use them all and I won't need an extra pair here. The upsides and the downsides of being a couple of homos who are more or less the same size, although he is a bit shorter than I am and not quite as broad in the shoulders.

He only left yesterday, but as usual, I'm bored already.

The Swedish word for the day is ärlig. It means honest.

- by Francis S.

She was wearing a pink shirt with black polkadots, the girl getting a manicure at one of the thousands of hair salons in this little city, and I thought she looked like an antibiotic.

For some reason, those colors reminded me of a high school biology experiment in which we were given tabs of various antibiotics - erythromycin, tetracycline, and god knows what else - all scary yellows and pinks and greens with black markings on them, which we put in petrie dishes filled with agar. We put the tabs in four quadrants of the dish, marked them off, then rubbed cotton swabs into our throats, then dabbed the swabs into the agar. Two days later, we could see how the antibiotic had prevented bacteria from growing. And all I could think of was that the antibiotics looked dangerous, like angry bees somehow; even the names sounded like they could sting you.

The Swedish phrase for the day is säg till, which means, more or less, let me know.

- by Francis S.

At dinner last night, H., the carpenter, told us that he has a fear of fruit.

"If I'm on the bus, it's like I have a sixth sense," he said matter-of-factly, but with a twinkle in his eye. "I can hear someone opening a paper bag and I can tell it's fruit. They stick their hands in the bag, and I can tell how heavy the fruit is, like, it's too heavy to be a plum it must be an apple, or even heavier, a banana. Then I can hear that little "chunk" when they break off the stem, and pull down the peel and then I smell banana, and I get all sweaty and uncomfortable."

I looked and looked, but I couldn't find the greek word for this fear of fruit. Karpophobia? Froutaphobia? It doesn't seem to exist.

The Swedish words for the day are rädsla and frukt. They mean, of course, fear and fruit.

- by Francis S.

I dreamt that I was eating dinner at a crowded and vast table, elbow to elbow with Queen Elizabeth, and although I was trying very hard to be dainty, I accidentally brushed against her with my arm.

She went ballistic, screaming at me "no one touches me!"

What the hell was that all about?

The Swedish word for the day is matsal. It means dining room.

- by Francis S.

A., the TV director, got tickets to see Farenheit 9/11, which the husband and I, as well as C., the fashion photographer and his children and even A.'s parents all duly went and saw in a sold-out theater.

Everyone was a bit disappointed as we sat down to dinner afterwards.

"It was so unsubtle," said C.'s daughter. "They made George Bush look stupid in such a stupid way."

"I didn't get the part about the Bin Ladens," said C.'s son. "Who cares?"

"I don't think that European audiences will like it so much," said A.

I said that it was made for Americans, so it's not meant to be subtle, it's supposed to play on people's emotions. Although it probably won't convince anyone of anything.

Still, we all agreed that the important point was that the war is mostly about money, in the end.

"So, do you think Hillary Clinton will become president?" A. asked me.

No, I said, she's hated by too many people.

"Which do you think will be first, a black president or a woman president?" A. asked.

Hard to say, I answered.

"Did you know Chelsea Clinton is in Stockholm right now?" A. asked.

No, I hadn't known. (I wonder if Chelsea is as fucked up as those poor Bush girls.)

"Is it really true that Bush could get re-elected?" they all asked me.

Depends on what happens in the three weeks before the election, I said. And they were all astounded and I found it very hard to explain that Americans aren't stupid and gullible.

Then the husband and I walked home, and when we got there, we turned on the TV, only to find a show about a pair of wacky Swedish guys spending an entire day with Monica Lewinsky, who got one guy to get his hair permed and the other guy to get an "M" shaved onto the side of his head.

She's kind of charming, Monica, a little lonely and sad, and very well-spoken yet terribly unsure of herself, but charming in a way that does not conjure up blowjobs and semen on skirts. But not charming enough to keep me watching once they went to the Kabbalah Center.

The things Swedes think about America.

The Swedish word for the day lurad. It means tricked.

- by Francis S.

"Here," the husband said, handing me a grimy packet of chewing gum, cinnamon-flavored, my favorite.

Where did that come from, I asked.

It turns out he'd brought it back from New York when he was there in April and he'd unearthed it from a bag somewhere where he'd forgotten it.

The strange thing in Sweden is that there is no cinnamon-flavored candy of any sort. They much prefer licorice that has been laced with ammonia-y salt.

And now, as I start thinking about fixing a curry for tonight's dinner party - a mix of caraway seed, cloves, bay leaves, cinnamon sticks, cardemom, fresh ginger, garlic and onion, turmeric, saffron and ground cashews - I'm wondering what makes a culture choose to love a certain spice above others? Why wasn't I raised to have a sweet tooth for caraway- or saffron- or ginger-flavored chewing gum?

Interestingly, chewing gum doesn't go stale, sitting in a bag somewhere for five or six months.

The Swedish word for the day is, of course, kanel. It means cinnamon.

- by Francis S.

I'm going through some kind of strange memento mori stage: As I walk down the street, I look at all the handsome young men and for some reason I can only see what they'll look like when they're, say, 75. All burnished and balding and sagging a bit.

What would Freud say?

The Swedish word for the day is knasig. It means wacky.

- by Francis S.

Last week, we went to a funeral, a woman who was the beloved grandmother and mother of close friends of ours. In Sweden, men wear black suits with black or white ties and everyone carries a flower or bouquet - in most cases, a single white rose - that is laid on the coffin one by one as each mourner walks past and pays respect toward the end of the service.

Though I hardly knew her, I shed a few tears, mostly at my friends' pain.

The way we mark death is so peculiar, invoking God with a few weakly sung psalms, and then coffee and sandwiches and sherry and small talk. Death has been so removed from life, we really don't know what to make of it. Not that I have any decent alternative to what we do.

Maybe getting good and drunk and accidental rending of garments?

The Swedish word for the day is tvärtom. It means on the contrary.

- by Francis S.

This explains everything. George W. Bush as a prep school brat playing at gangbanging: "People dying right now 'cause I said so, that's my work. Fuck New York. This apple aint so big." (hats off to Kip for the link.)

The countdown has started. Only one week until the Republican National Convention.

The Swedish word for the day is protest. It needs no translation.

- by Francis S.

I wonder if The Tinkerbell Hilton Diaries will ever be released in Sweden? And will the author, madman and wag about town Dong Resin, be coming to Stockholm on a worldwide book tour?

Nah.

The Swedish phrase for the day is ett visst antal. It means a certain number.

- by Francis S.

If it's raining in the morning, or I'm just too tired, instead of walking I take the bus. Even if I have to wait a bit, I take the No. 42 instead of the No. 4, even though the No. 4 is one of those buses that bends in the middle. It's that the No. 42 has a nicer route, taking Karlavägen, with its row of linden trees in the middle, its bronze statues (nearly all women in some stage of undress, but there is one naked man with an enviable physique), snobby little shops and cafés, and troops of little old ladies walking tiny dogs of one sort or another.

The Swedish word for the day is alldeles. It means completely.

- by Francis S.

It's a great big slumber party over here: The priest and the policeman came home from a month in Finland to find their apartment flooded, so while everything is being fixed, they're here for a week, complete with toddler and crib, camping out in the spare bedroom.

I know how fun and exhausting it is to hang out with someone who's been on this earth for, oh, about 20 months. But I forgot that I would look forward to coming home from work so much, the sound of the little feet of my goddaughter come running when I unlock the front door, to see that grubby little face and that waddling kind of diaper run she does, to hear her calling out to see if it's me.

Or to be honest, calling out to see if it's the husband, not me.

This could have something to do with the fact that the night before, as she sat on my lap while we ate sushi, I failed to notice that she had grabbed a great gob of wasabi from my plate until she started screaming after she'd stuffed it into her mouth.

I think she's going to have a lifelong fear of green gooey stuff, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But me, what kind of godfather am I?

I just found a little half-eaten cheese and butter sandwich tucked away on a low shelf in the old maid's room.

I'm in love with her, my goddaughter.

The Swedish word for the day is trotsålder. We call it the terrible twos in the States. She's got less than four months to go.

- by Francis S.

Fashion trend or unpleasant coincidence? In the past week I've seen four different people, four, wearing black shirts with vivid orange flames, shirts that look exactly like the "uniforms" the kids behind the Burger King counter wear.

Maybe I'm just hopelessly out of sync with what's hip.

The Swedish phrase for the day, pommes frites, is actually French. Americans call them french fries, the Brits call them chips.

- by Francis S.

"Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea-cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

As if to make up, in just a couple of days, for all the cold weather we had during the summer, it's turned hot, truly hot. And when it's hot like this, I can't help conjuring Harper Lee's sentence in my mind, about the ladies as sweat- and talcum-frosted tea-cakes. I think ever since I read that, when I was 11 or so, I've kept that image in my mind, of what hot really is.

I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird a couple of weeks ago. It hasn't lost any of its bittersweet punch, it still stings the heart.

The Swedish word for the day is intryck. It means impact.

- by Francis S.

The Oracular Vagina takes her place among world leaders.

It's probably easier to understand if you start at the beginning, and work your way to the top. Probably.

The Swedish word for the day is hårvård, which may look like an Ivy League university with a couple of extra circles, but in fact means hair care in English.

by Francis S.

Though I've been damned neglectful for the past months, it would be a shame if I didn't bother to mark the day.

Happy third birthday, blog.

The Swedish word for the day is tveksam. It means hesitant.

- by Francis S.

The summer's come and gone. To be more accurate, it never really quite arrived. There were no stretches of sunshiney days, everytime it seemed to start, it would be cut short by grey and cool and melancholy weather that helps one understand the problem of high suicide rates in this country. Not that I mind now, exactly. The dreariness of the summer will hit me in November.

So I sit, with a stubborn cough and a book (bad-boy book critic Dale Peck's Martin and John which, in the British edition I just bought, has been titled Fucking Martin, a change that I can't even hazard a guess as to the reasoning behind it), lolling about on the sofa in the library in our apartment while it rains outside. Remembering last week when I showed my beloved little brother how we were sitting, on the library sofa in the apartment, at exactly that obliquely angled point on the map where Odengatan runs into Odenplan.

Bizarre, how pleasureable it is to sit on a sofa in a shallow curve of windows that one can point to so directly on a map and say "we are sitting exactly there." Or here.

The Swedish word for the day is ont i halsen. It means sore throat.

- by Francis S.

While searching among a raft of old e-mail, I came across a message from my friend Edu, sent a year or so before he died.

How peculiar and unsettling a feeling it gave me.

I was unable to make myself read the mail, although my first thought was to reply.

But what to ask or say? "I think of you often" or "Are you still out there, somehow?" or "Are we sad and loathesome animals, when seen from afar, or pitiful, or beautiful?" or "Can one still be full of emotion, longing, wit, and irrational after death, really?"

In the end, I didn't send anything, nor did I read the mail.

The Swedish word for the day is själ. It means soul.

- by Francis S.

The way to Korpo Island in the vast Finnish archipelago begins with a flight into Turku. Roughly the equivalent of say, Providence, Rhode Island, Turku has an equally faded if a far more glorious past. A cursory 45-minute stroll in grey summer drizzle, the cheap Swedish brands in the tired shops clustered around the main square, the desperate-looking stalls in the middle of the square, everything exudes that cranky, weighed-down feel of a minor provincial city, the people somehow more suspicious and unfriendly than in a place more cosmopolitan and sure of itself.

You can take a bus from downtown Turku to get to Korpo, or if you happen to be going to a wedding, you can hitch a ride with fellow wedding guests whom you've never met before, who were given a description of you by the bride and told to look out for you, which in fact one of them did, asking you to join them.

In the car, a trans-Atlantic mix of Spaniard, Brit, Canadian, Swede, it will take a ferry ride to Nagu Island, and then a second ferry ride before you'll reach Korpo, the occupants of the car pre-occupied with getting there on time and catching up on the details of what has happened in their lives since they last saw each other, some of them nearly a decade ago. You will listen politely, putting in a word here and there when appropriate.

Korpo itself will be far greener than you expected, farms and cows and cottages and the sea, side by side by side by side. The church on Korpo, stone and some 800 years old, is more ancient than you had imagined, the bride even more beautiful and the priest, your good friend, will be no longer nervous about getting everything perfect for her little sister the bride, which somehow then makes everything perfect even if the organist has surpassed the awfulness of the organist at a wedding you were at in Malaysia once, playing very badly an ugly Finnish march by an obscure Finnish composer called Melartin, a march that lasts some five minutes longer than it takes for the bride and groom to make it to the altar.

Afterwards, you will be charmed by the old manor house in which the reception takes place - pink on the outside and rough and elegant on the inside, the room in which you eat dinner sporting a column with a visible bullet hole from a long-past civil war, and at one time having been the scene of Jean Sibelius playing the piano. There will be no electric lights, only candles, giving the scene an impossibly romantic and painterly and antique air, though it gets no darker than early dusk at the darkest point of the evening, everyone's eyes glittering and cheeks flushed and outlines cast in deep shadow.

You will be exhausted by the length and number of the speeches, which make the dinner last some six hours, but your dinner companions make up for it - a young woman from Amsterdam on your left who makes your favorite speech of the evening, and on your right the aunt of the bride, a retired war correspondent from Prague who in the early seventies studied film for four years on a Fullbright Scholarship at your Alma Mater, New York University.

You'll marvel at the crowd, a curious mix of upper-middle class Swedes - lawyers and bankers and high-level political advisors like the bride - and upper-middle class Finland-Svensk Finns of a certain left-ish, idiosyncratic and intellectual bent. Plus a bunch of upper-middle class foreigners like yourself.

You will drink too much red wine, and talk about what it is to live in a country that is not really your own, how no place is home anymore, how difficult it is to maintain a social welfare state. You'll laugh as your little goddaughter waves down the table at you, everyone thinking she's waving to them but you alone knowing that it's you and no one else.

Then you'll dance with great fervor and laugh at the bride doing her famous Britney Spears dance routine (danced not with her husband, but with your friend the Policeman). You dance so much and talk with so many interesting people that you'll somehow manage, through bad luck mostly and by 4:30 a.m. now in a decidedly foul mood, to end up sleeping beside the bride's other sister in her messy room at the family compound of the bride's family rather than in the best room at a lovely seaside hotel - painted wooden floors, windows onto the tiny harbor - on Nagu, an island away.

You'll wake up two hours later in your suit, sweaty and greasy and cold all at the same time, unable to see because you took out your contact lenses before passing out, and your friend the priest walks you up to the road where you can catch a bus back to the hotel, and she fills you in on all sorts of family gossip that helps to make sense of some of the night before.

The bus will take you back, and after a shower and a change of clothes, the whole dreamlike ending of the night before will no longer be annoying but rather, you're sure, become a great story to tell, especially after the hotel gives you a discount on account of you didn't mess up the beds.

After the brunch with the rest of the pale and hungover guests at the family compound (which, with your contact lenses in you can now see is unsurpassingly beautiful, a whole bay they have to themselves, somehow more melancholy, more full of soul than the islands off Stockholm, which are what make it more beautiful), and all the driving back and forth on roads and ferries into Korpo, and then back again to Nagu and finally into Turku, and the plane ride home - a propeller plane, your first in years and years and years - you will be happy to be home, to your own bed and your own husband.

The way to and from Korpo is long and complicated, but it is well worth every second.

The Swedish word for the day is äventyr. It means, of course, adventure.

- by Francis S.

Summer has begun - cloudy, cool, tenuous - all the hard work preparing for the weeks and weeks off is done.

My parents, who were here for a visit, have come and gone. As has midsummer, which we celebrated out on Ornö, a perfect day with sun and all the proper accoutrements: birch branches cut from trees in a wood above a little inlet on the island, the branches wired to the midsummer pole while flowers were wrapped into wreathes by my mother and the editor from Wallpaper, who was in from London without her husband, who was shooting pictures for a magazine in Australia; there was herring and more herring, and snaps and me leading most of the singing with the few drinking songs I know, and then the putting up of the pole and the dancing around it and the games. The island showed itself off to perfection for my parents, and the guests were charming and full of stories.

Along with midsummer, we gave dinners and went to dinners and drank bottles and bottles of red wine. We climbed through the attic and up to the top of the tower at Nordiska Museet and saw Stockholm from on high courtesy of a friend who works at the museum, me clinging to the walls and afraid to grab the railing and look down. We shopped at the market at Hötorget where my parents bought flowers to put in boxes on the front balcony. We heard a lecture at Sofiakyrkan, and my parents met the husband's nephew, the priest and the policeman and their daughter who is our goddaughter. My father fixed countless doorhandles, the front door, the lamp in the dining room and hung a heavy piece of art on the wall.

They left yesterday morning, leaving at 6 a.m. in a taxi.

The husband and I are alone in the apartment for the first time, as the lodger is at a wedding in the States. We spent the day inside, watching movies, hardly bothering to look for the sun between the clouds.

Summer has begun.

The Swedish phrase for the day is det samma. It means likewise.

- by Francis S.

Last weekend, the husband threw a big party at work and had our former neighbor, L., the chef, cater the food. Which she did with her usual panache, I heard - I was at the 25th birthday of a pop star, sipping soup and yammering away with a half-Danish, half-American girl who is a VJ on MTV Europe. I can yammer with the best of them, but it turns out I am an old fart, without a doubt.

But that's all beside the point. Which is that when we went to return to L. all the heaps of Moroccan bowls and plates and platters, the glasses and the elaborate footed metal steam tray that had been used at the husband's party, it meant going back to our old neighborhood on Söder and, worse, seeing the old apartment house.

It was most peculiar walking up the steps and then looking out the window at the courtyard, which is beautiful and green and new and so much nicer than our current courtyard.

And then looking at the galleys for L.'s cookbook that is coming out in the fall, walking in L,'s apartment through rooms with different colored walls, different furniture and different tile, but nonetheless are virtually the same as the rooms in our old flat, more peculiar still.

It felt a bit small, a bit low to me.

It felt sad to the husband, who is still mourning the move.

I figure he'll have recovered sometime in November.

In the meantime, I plan to enjoy every minute.

The Swedish words for the day are gullviva, mandelblom, kattfot, blå viol. They mean cowslip, meadow saxifrage, cat's foot, wild violet.

- by Francis S.

It turns out, to turn T.S. Eliot on his head, that the universe started not with a bang but a whimper. Or rather a whine... at least musically, according to Mark Whittle, a researcher who's somehow reduced the Big Bang and subsequent millenia into an audible soundwave analysis.

Here, listen for yourself.

The Swedish phrase for the day is i början. It means in the beginning.

- by Francis S.

Yesterday was Sweden's national day, a day when this nation of people who seem to have a horror of nationalism celebrate their country. Of course Swedes believe that the Swedish way of doing things is the fairest and best way, but it's not something to celebrate, it's something that just is. There's no such thing as a "Basic Truth" day, after all.

Still, they're not 100 percent sure that the Swedish way of doing things is the fairest and best way; they do have plenty of complaints about the Swedish way of doing things.

So, these apparently two contradictory emotions are surely contributing factors to the fact that the national day isn't even a bank holiday, although this is supposed to change sometime in the future, when one of the more obscure religious bank holidays - Ascension or Pentecost - will be booted from the vacation-day calendar.

Outside parliament, a hundred Aryan-nation types were arrested (scroll down a little to read the article). I guess they were celebrating by attacking some leftist demonstrators in an attempt to make up for the rest of the country's lack of jingoist fervor.

Me, I celebrated by attending a ceremony at City Hall (in the Blue Hall where they have the Nobel Prize ceremony) for the latest crop of new Swedish citizens. Surrounded by hundreds of people from all over the world, we were welcomed by various low-level politicoes and serenaded by fellow immigrants, mostly in English. Then we sang the national anthem and they fed us salmon and gave us sparkling wine, and I got a certificate with my name misspelled.

I said all of about 50 words during the whole thing: I spoke for about 15 seconds to the guy sitting next to me, a Finn who has lived in Sweden for 30 years. I asked him why he was getting his citizenship now, and he said it was because damn Finland finally allowed dual citizenship. Although I had thought it was Sweden that finally allowed dual citizenship. And then I said thanks later to the politician who gave me the certificate.

Yet somehow, it was pleasing and awkward and ever so Swedish in the self-consciously un-Swedishness of the whole event, despite the singing the national anthem.

I was charmed, and even a bit proud, even if that is a most un-Swedish sentiment to have.

The Swedish word for the day is Sveariket, a word from which the name Sverige - the Swedish word for Sweden - is derived. It was an area of Sweden inhabited by the Svear, an area that seems to be the equivalent of today's central Sweden and the six provinces of Svealand: Dalarna, Närke, Södermanland, Uppland, Värmland and Västmanland

- by Francis S.

The summer cottages on the islands of the Stockholm archipelago rarely have the kind of indoor plumbing one finds on the mainland. Oh, there's hot and cold running water, and toilets even. But at the cottage of A., the assistant director and C., the fashion photographer, there is actually a toilet. You just can't pee in it. Which means taking a piss outside.

So, when I woke up in the middle of the night, I immediately regretted that I had stupidly drunk a full glass and a half of water directly before falling into bed next to the husband. And try as I might, my insistent and crabby pea-sized bladder would not let me fall back asleep.

Determined not to go to all the trouble of putting on my clothes and shoes to step outside, I opened the window and stood bravely, stark naked, dick to the wind.

Unfortunately, it was 2:30 a.m., the sun was up with full force and since a bunch of trees had been taken down last fall, my bladder decided that we were entirely too exposed, that the whole world could possibly see us pee and, after letting loose one short burst, refused to unclench.

I think I stood for a full five minutes, fighting with it and wondering what someone would make of this 43-year-old man standing naked at a window, holding his dick, his face a tight little knot of determination, desperation, humiliation.

I finally gave up and crawled back into bed. A half hour later, I finally broke down, put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and made the long trip outside and found a tree that my bladder felt was sufficiently discreet.

So, the question is, do girls ever get pee-shy?

The Swedish word for the day, a repeat, is my all-time favorite Swedish word: kissnödig. It means in desperate need of taking a piss.

- by Francis S.

Is it too late in the year to be wearing black?

Or is it never too late in the year to wear black, for fashionistas like myself - or rather for those of us who are married to fashionistas and are fashionistas by default?

I felt a bit dour and puritanical, walking to work in the morning under the invincible sun, black sweater and black jacket and black shoes. And then walking again to a long lunch with the cat veterinarian, who is visiting from Chicago. He wasn't wearing black.

I guess I should switch to something a bit more light-hearted.

June is busting out all over, after all.

The Swedish phrase for the day is det beror på. It means that depends on.

- by Francis S.

On Saturday, it hailed with a fury on Birds Island. Only pea-sized, it wasn't dangerous and we were snug inside the house so I didn't even bother to go out and see exactly how much it might hurt to stand and get pelted by pellets of ice. Nonetheless, it was impressive, lasting nearly half an hour, and the ground was white with it afterwards, almost like snow.

Winter is so reluctant to give up the ghost.

Amazingly, the great wild beds of lily of the valley in the yard were undamaged. Inside the house, all it took was a small handful of those tiny white bells gathered by me, the husband and A., the assistant director, to perfume the whole room. It brought my mother to mind, sharply: a black and white dress, her hair stiff and her lips painted a brilliant orange, the scent of Muguet des Bois mixed with the scent of hairspray. Bittersweet, that smell, just like my eight-year-old self felt at the excitement and disappointment and worry of my parents going out for the evening.

The sense of smell is, without a doubt, the most able to spur memories. Smell and taste, I suppose.

The Swedish word for the day is lillgammal, which would loosely translate as precocious, as in a precocious child, although it is a more negative word.

- by Francis S.

Like many of your garden-variety great big homo types, I'm easily intimidated by certain bastions of maledom - the barber shop, the garage, certain hardware stores, old-fashioned gyms - and the men who work in these places. Such as the guy who came this afternoon to install the washer and dryer. I feel deficient, somehow, when he asks me if this electrical outlet is connected to that electrical outlet, and whether I want to have access to the water valve. I don't know, I stammer in Swedish, yes, I say and shrug, and hope that he doesn't start asking me about the pipes, using all these Swedish manly words that I have no idea what they mean.

He's gone now, on his way to Sundsvall for the long weekend he told me, it being Ascension tomorrow and most of the country taking a four-day weekend.

And we, lucky bastards, now have our own washer and dryer actually in the apartment. No more having to live life around laundry reservation times, a mere three hours every weekend but it's never enough on account of it takes an hour and 20 minutes per load of laundry and then the only dryer is a, um, drying closet where you hang things up on racks in this big wardrobe thing, something you don't have in the U.S., probably because it takes at least an hour and a half to dry anything.

The Swedish word for the day is rörmokare. It means plumber.

- by Francis S.

I'm only a little more than half way through my thousand difficult lessons, but as you may have noticed, the writing is getting pretty thin. The greater difficulty seems to be not in the learning of the lessons, which continue as they always have and they are difficult. It's just even more difficult writing it down here. I don't seem to have the drive to write these days.

It's not as if things are any different than they usually are or unworthy of writing about - I should have written about watching a bunch of 17 year olds performing "Hamlet" in Swedish, which was completely beyond my comprehension with the exception of Ophelia, who went dutifully and pitifully mad in a Swedish that I could follow, which could in part be due to the fact that I know the actress well, being as she is the daughter of C., the fashion photographer; I should also have written about the birthday party on Saturday, with ex-football players, and actresses who play Japanese reporters on TV, and the son of a princess, and A., the assistant director, and her sister, whose birthday it was, and all of us dancing and swigging mojitos and me feeling like an old man, too tired already at midnight to last much longer than 1 a.m.

But I'm loathe to stop writing entirely. I've always been disappointed when people whom I regularly read just up and quit.

What will it take, do you think, to get me back on track with this? I have 407 lessons to go!

The Swedish phrase for the day is dåligt samvete. It means bad conscience.

- by Francis S.

Good thing I made myself learn the Swedish national anthem when I became a Swedish citizen. I was taking my lunchtime stroll through Djurgården when a bunch of 14-year-old girls ran up to me, begging me to sing "Du Gamla, Du Fria" as part of some school scavenger-hunt type exercise so popular with the Swedes who, in an attempt to alleviate their natural taciturn natures, incessantly force on themselves such games designed to make them interact with strangers.

I didn't tell them that I wasn't a real Swede, or that I actually didn't need the paper with the words on it because I have them memorized.

I sang, they thanked me effusively in that loud and laughing 14-year-old kind of way, and I walked back to the office, inordinately proud of myself. The pride has worn off, though, and now I'm feeling a bit blue at the prospect of the American editor and his wife leaving us. As consolation, though, the husband has returned from America, bearing gifts and assorted sexual favors.

The Swedish word for the day is promenad, which as you probably can guess, means a walk or promenade.

- by Francis S.

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.