Are you superstitious? I'm not terribly superstitious, but I do have a few little quirks that amount to superstition. Like with the rip-off-a-page calendar sitting on the desk next to the computer I am writing this on, for which I feel it is tempting fate to rip off a page before I've actually completed the day, as if it could contribute somehow to an untimely death. My untimely death, mainly. I suppose I should be more worried about being killed from all the cholesterol in the food I ate yesterday - we celebrated our Thanksgiving yesterday, cooking all day to feed 16 people with the whole nine yards, turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes and cranberries and pumpkin pie and pecan pie and 72 homemade rolls. I'm still full.

The Swedish word for the day is vidskeplig. It means superstitious.

- by Francis S.

Isn't it great that despite the fact that individual states are passing nasty anti-gay marriage referendums left and right, and the Catholic church is reiterating the usual garbage about homosexuals having a disorder, gay people are creating a hodge-podge of families in sometimes rather creative ways in the US? It's a regular gay baby boom. I know that my own nieces and nephews in both Chicago and Minneapolis refer quite casually to hanging out at the homes of friends who have two moms.

You can even feel it here in little Sweden, where our goddaughter goes to daycare with at least one kid who has two mommies, and one of her sometime playmates not only has two mommies, but two daddies (a classic case of a creative family group).

According to a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine, the 2000 US census showed that some 22 percent of gay men are raising a child under 18 at home, and for lesbians it's 34 percent. That's pretty amazing.

What I wonder is how much people realize that all these children are hurt at least as much as their parents are by anti-gay marriage laws, and far worse, by laws that forbid any recognition of gay relationships.

I wonder how many kids it's going to take to tip the balance?

The Swedish word for the day is elak. It means mean or cruel.

- by Francis S.

How is it possible that a city that lies at a latitude of 59° 17' N could be unprepared for snow? Sure, we'd had a long summer that drifted into a mild autumn, and the leaves were still mostly green and few had fallen. But still, it was the first of November, and the meteorologists had been predicting snow since the weekend, so I failed to understand how so many buses could have crashed, the roads could have been at a standstill, the trains could have been shut down and the subway could have been all gummed up. I didn't really care, though, looking down at the traffic in Odenplan from our warm-as-toast apartment, playing Bach fugues on the piano in perfect accompaniment to the wildly blowing snow.

Winter is here, and it's only November 2nd.

The Swedish word for the day is krock. It means crash.

- by Francis S.

Did you play with dolls when you were a little kid? I did. I was given a baby doll, which I never liked much, when I was probably two and my sister had gotten a big plastic doll the size of a toddler with long hair and little dresses and plastic shoes, a doll that I really wanted for myself and that a little rubber baby doll was little consolation for not having. I'm pretty sure that it was at this point suspicions were first planted in my mother's mind that I was not your usual little boy. Although I did like matchbox cars, too. I just liked dolls better.

Flash forward to 43 years later, to the husband and I in a store buying birthday presents for our goddaughter, the only child of our good friends the priest and the policeman. She was four on Wednesday, and one of her numerous birthday parties was yesterday. We got her glitter crayon things (they were actually more like big lipsticks) and glitter magic markers and horse stickers. And then we went to the store with children's clothes next to my office building, the store with the bright pink little workboots in the window.

Naturally, all those little clothes were irresistable. The husband and I can never go in a place like that and just buy one thing, we end up getting whole ensembles (and I don't think the husband is one of those guys who ever played with dolls when he was a child, he was a manly little boy I suspect, even if he's Mr. Fashion Guy now). It's like getting even for my sister having the fun doll with the clothes and me having the baby doll with diapers and a blanket.

Our goddaughter now has a fall coat with matching gloves, hat and scarf, along with a pair of matching little pink workboots. I was worried that she wouldn't like everything because it was brown and pink - another friend of mine's six-year-old daughter refused to wear a dress that was brown with pink polka dots, because "it's not pink!" - but after the guests had gone, and the five of us had eaten a spaghetti dinner, our goddaughter put on a brief fashion show with all her new clothes.

The question remains, are we becoming a bad influence on her?

The Swedish word for the day is rosa. It means pink.

by Francis S.

It was Francis' first husband's therapist who pinpointed exactly what it was that gave Francis his edge, that had helped him survive his childhood with all his fears, his lack of appropriately boyish attributes, his being called names, his timidity, his overall goody-goodiness.

"A narcissistic agenda of entitlement," was what the therapist had said to Francis' first husband, who had duly reported it back to Francis, as if it would change Francis for the better.

Francis found the use of the adjective "narcissistic" an exaggeration, but he freely admitted that from an early age, he had been endowed with a strong sense that the things he considered life's necessities were his for the asking.

Want to know more? You'll just have to buy the book Boys to Men, a collection of coming of age stories edited by Ted Gideonse and Rob Williams that happens to include an essay called "Five Stories about Francis."

The Swedish word for the day is barndom. It means childhood.

- by Francis S.

A couple of weeks ago Sweden voted in a center-right government (for you Americans, center-right in Sweden means to the left of the Democrats). As part of the regime change, they've put in new people at the top, naturally, including a new Minister for Culture (can you imagine having a Minister for Culture in the U.S.? What would such a person do?). Unfortunately, Cecilia Stegö Chilò, the new Minister for Culture, hasn't made a very good impression - critics seem to think that her background working at a conservative think tank means she doesn't have much experience with cultural issues such as art, theatre, music - and it recently came out that she hasn't paid her TV license fee for 16 years (can you imagine having a TV license fee in the U.S.?), which at a minimum means she's a scofflaw.

"They asked her what books she has on her nightstand, and she said she has five but then she couldn't name any of them," the husband told me.

Could you name the books on your nightstand?

I actually had to go look and confirm: The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist (which I just finished and liked immensely but wouldn't recommend to anyone); Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco (I should just toss the book, every time I try to read it I realize I can stand neither the style nor the subject), What Love Means to You People by NancyKay Shapiro. I had forgotten two books that have been sitting there forever: The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald and The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, neither of which have turned out to be my cup of tea.

But the sixth book, which I did remember, and which is my cup of tea but for some reason I keep letting it get superseded by other books, is My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

And now he's won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's time to pick it up again and finish - it really is fantastical and charming and fascinating and dark all at once.

The Swedish word for the day is läsare. It means reader.

- by Francis S.

How did I not know that Annie Liebovitz and Susan Sontag were a couple? Where the hell have I been? At this rate, I'm on my way to losing my homosexualist credentials!

(I think I'm going to have to buy Annie Liebovitz' book, A Photographer's Life 1990-2005.)

The Swedish word for the day is avslöjande. It means revelation.

- by Francis S.

One of the bad things about living in a minor European capital is that movies usually arrive months after they open in the States. Like The Squid and the Whale, which came out more than half a year after it was released in the U.S. Of course, it has been playing here for four months and we didn't get around to seeing it until last week. The reward for waiting so long was that we ended up being the only people in the theater, so we stretched out, bought extra candy and felt free to chatter throughout the movie, which improves the viewing experience, believe me. And it was a good movie, but would have been a great one if Jeff Daniels had given us a small bone of sympathy, something to make us feel even just a fleeting moment's empathy and sorrow for his character. Still, Jesse Eisenberg playing his teen-aged son was superb.

But not all is bad when it comes to movies in Stockholm. For one thing, when you buy your tickets you get assigned seats. But the biggest advantage Stockholm has over New York when it comes to movies is that we get Almodóvar first. From the first seconds of any of his movies - the overwrought music and the jarring titles - I'm hooked like I am with no other director. I want to take the next flight to Madrid. I want to eat peppers chopped by Penelope Cruz, I want to hold hands with Rossy De Palma, I want to lick Fele Martinez' neck.

Volver didn't disappoint. The usual vivid colors, strong women and extreme situations that somehow seem normal, horrible deeds that are humanized, all reminiscent of 1950s melodrama but with an underlying toughness coupled to tenderness that can be found in no other movies. And shots like the overhead view of a mourning niece being noisily kissed by a swarm of village women with fans, everyone in black. And the glorious Carmen Maura was back again, even though she once said she would never work with Almodóvar again.

Still, as A. the TV producer said, it wasn't as complex or compelling as his previous film. "I don't want to go out and see it again right away like I did with Bad Education," she said.

I feel ungrateful complaining though, as if it weren't brilliant anyway.

The Swedish verb for the day is att återvända which is how they've translated the title of the film into Swedish. It means to return.

- by Francis S.

Ballet, like opera, is an aquired taste. I've never cared much for classical ballet, it's too rigid and prissy for me. Modern dance is more easily digestible. Not easier to understand, just a lot more fun to watch. So it was on Thursday when we went to see Sweden's great modern dance company, Cullberg Baletten. Two pieces, one playful and one political, full of life and always eye-catching, if a bit inscrutable. Well, not really the political one; it was a little heavy on the message, but mostly managed to still be interesting rather than being weighed down by the didactic.

Still, what struck me most as we sat there was that seven years ago, when I moved here, the husband knew about half of the dance company. But a few have left, and most have reached the age of 40 and retired. Really, I was amazed by how young the dancers were. And then I thought how I still consider myself young and with my creative life ahead of me.

Hell, I'm 45.

What have I been thinking?

Still, I suppose in order to keep going, everyone must feel that they have lots of life, or at least worthwhile time, ahead of them.

The Swedish word for the day is konst. It means art.

- by Francis S.

On Thursday, as I sat eating lunch in the Haymarket, my phone rang. It was M. from London.

"Where are you?" he asked.

It turned out that he was also at the Haymarket, having arrived from London the day before, so we walked down Kungsgatan and stopped and had coffee at a cafe, and he told me all about his brother and his movie and our mutual friends, and we decided that he should come to dinner on Friday.

So, I left work at 4 p.m. on Friday and bought everything I needed to make eggplant parmesan for eight people, and rushed home and chopped tomatoes and an onion, and cut eggplant into thin slices and fried it, and made bechamel with plenty of nutmeg, and grated cheese and kneaded dough and tossed salad, and as the guests arrived, put on the finishing touches and wiping sweat from my forehead and cursing the husband for showing up after all the guests, at last took a glass of wine along with M., and C., the fashion photographer and the sea captain and the children's book author.

Then A., the TV producer and I walked around the apartment, and she showed me how she could turn on the lights with her toes. She has, thankfully, very clean toes, the nails laquered a rather vivid orange.

"Dammit," she said when she'd finished. "I wished I'd bet you that I could do it."

Feh, I said. I would've known better than to make a bet with her. She always wins.

Then we sat down to eat, three conversations going on at once coalescing into one loud canon on politics, everyone a bit hot under the collar despite the occasional breaks to go out and smoke cigars on the front balcony, and when R., the pop star showed up, she was shocked to see we were only eight and not 20, because when she had talked to the husband on the phone before she arrived it had sounded a real cacaphony from her end of the receiver.

And even though I tried to steer the conversation away from politics by standing up and telling people to shut up already and listen to M. tell us about his movie, it just devolved into a conversation about religion. Which was just as bad.

But really, everyone survived.

The thing is, I've been thinking that what I'm best at is being the perfect host. Even if I can't get people to stop arguing about politics.

Too bad I can't get paid for it.

The Swedish phrase for the day is maten är klar. It means, more or less, dinner is ready.

- by Francis S.

Do you remember what it's like to be 13?

I realize, looking back on it, that as I shamed my 13-year-old nephew by retelling for the 10th time the story of how he threw up on an amusement park ride, that I've surely forgotten.

I had a grand time with the niece and nephew. They're funny and fun, a bit shy sometimes but not terribly self-conscious on the whole, and they didn't complain once about a single thing.

Then again, we went all out, with touristing around the old town and watching the changing of the guard, a visit to the Modern Art Museum (to assuage their mother, although the revolting Paul McCarthy mechanical pig was worth a good ten minutes of gaping), a ferry trip out to the archipelago and a weekend on an island, a concert, laser tag, fishing for crayfish in the middle of the night, the Stockholm Pride Parade, and lots of shopping and walking and dinners and meeting of various friends. Plus the ill-fated visit to the amusement park, which they didn't seem to hold against me.

But how could I have forgotten what it's like to be 13? It was a horrible year for me. And really, to remain a member of the human race one should be required to remember what it's like to be 13, just to keep one humble and aware of how awfully tender and easily scraped we humans are, in constant need of emotional bandaids.

The Swedish word for the day is nöjesfält. It means amusement park.

- by Francis S.

For most Swedes, summer is more than half over, with a little more than a week left in the month-long holiday that is July. A fickle month here, you can't really count on July for anything. When July decides to show its best side, you don't want to miss it. But the chances are about even that it will bare its teeth and spit at you, and if you have been unlucky enough to choose to spend your summer holiday in Sweden, come November you'll be a wreck and unable to face the onslaught of dark winter.

This summer, though I've spent most of it working, has shown July to be in a most sunny disposition. I don't mind, and every weekend we've made it out to the archipelago, usually on the ferry where we've encountered Spanish women from the Canary Islands, complete with fans, and 90-year-old Swedish women who were in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil war, and lesbians with babies, along with hosts of garden-variety Swedes, each of them with a beer in hand it seems.

Today, however, we are being chauffered by the sea captain and his boyfriend the children's author, in their little powerboat, which should get us to Birds Island in about an hour. We have a full weekend of relaxation planned. Which will consist, I hope, mostly of lying around in the sun, periodically looking up from a book or conversation to gaze at cruise ships like upended skyscrapers moving silently past in the distance.

Then on Monday, I need to prepare for the onslaught of my brother's two oldest children.

Lord help us, may they not be bored to tears by me and the husband. I fear that I'm woefully out of touch with what's fun if you're 13 or 15.

The Swedish word for the day is tonåringar, which has surely been the Swedish word for the day before. It means teenagers.

- by Francis S.

On the grounds of Drottningholm, the palace where the royal family of Sweden lives, there stands a little baroque theater, built by a Swedish queen with the unfortunate name of Lovisa Ulrika. Through chance, the fickleness of fashion and political change, and through the benefit of nearly 150 years of complete neglect, the theater survived intact with some 15 complete sets of original scenery, including all kinds of pillars and trees, clouds and machines for making thunder noises or delivering gods from the skies.

It is a charming place, and even more charming to see the dress rehearsal of an opera there, the theater so intimate you feel you can reach out and grab the hands of the singers when they implore, or help them up from the ground when they fall down in a poisoned faint, or protect them from an evil sorcerer in black inciting human sacrifices in an elegant and rich bass voice.

The orchestra is tiny but muscular, just like the director, who sways and bounces his way through the score, batonless, clapping the beat in frustration at the chorus who do not keep time crisply enough for his taste as the third act (or was it the fourth act?) finishes and they are playing the part of writhing demons pressed downstage to the very edge of the proscenium, threatening the audience with all kind of evil and mayhem and making the hairs raise on one's arms. Even the dance, which I usually detest, is enigmatic and Mark-Morris-but-in-high-heels-ishy quirky, all heiroglyphic gestures and oddly graceful.

And despite having only the faintest grasp of the plot and no grasp of the language (except for the constant repetition of the word "amour" and the odd word, such as "peutetre" here and there) and being unable to read in the dimly authentic lighting, I was enchanted by Rameau's Zoroastre.

The Swedish word for the day genrep, which is short for generalrepetition. It means dress rehearsal.

- by Francis S.

It's difficult not to be discouraged by the latest news from the U.S.: The New York State Court of Appeals ruled, in a 4-2 decision, that gay people don't have the right to get married.

But what puts me in a black mood isn't the decision, which isn't surprising even if many hoped that it would have gone the other way. What's really awful is the rationale behind it. As Patrick Healy wrote in the New York Times: In particular, ...one section suggesting heterosexual couples need marriage to be preserved as a way to shore up their faulty relationships and protect their children who might suffer in broken-home situations.

Can these judges really believe this to be true? The logic escapes me. And this is supposedly one of the most liberal states in the union. And now every other state court will cite this in their own rulings that will, sometimes subtly and sometimes harshly, say that not only are gay people unworthy of having their relationships recognized, but having them recognized will somehow ruin the relationships of heterosexuals and destroy the lives of children.

The same article rightfully says that the ruling is a shocking insult to gay people.

As for me, I give up.

The Swedish word for the day is teokrati. It means theocracy.

- by Francis S.

I'm baaaaaack.

Well, actually, I didn't go anywhere much. It was my parents who came to visit, and I'm still recovering from their busy social schedule: Along with midsummer, which was spent out in the archipelago with A., the TV producer and C., the fashion photographer and select members of their families, we managed to have dinner with some group or other every single night my parents were here, except for one Sunday, in which we had brunch with the husband's nephew and girlfriend and baby. Oh, and the Thursday before they left, when they went out to Lidingö without us to have dinner with the guy who was a Swedish exchange student living at our house back in the early 1980s, when my beloved little brother was still in high school and I was away at university.

The thing is, everyone always wants to see my parents, and I thought about having one huge dinner party, but then I knew some people would be hurt not to have time alone with them, so it ended up being a week of hosting dinners.

It was grand.

But isn't it embarrassing when your mother and father have more of a social life than you do, in your own city, thousands of miles from where they live?

The Swedish words for the day are mamma and pappa, which are of course what most Swedish people seem to call their mom and dad, and even, strangely, how I refer to my mother and father in Swedish to other people (and which I accidentally used with my parents once or twice, shamefully, when the evening involved a lot of translating and back and forth between English and Swedish.)

- by Francis S.

Uh, this is the 21st century, isn't it?

Does anyone with a grain of intellect in 2006 believe anymore that women are inferior to men?

Because really, no matter how you cut it, any objections to the Rt. Reverend Katherine Jefferts Schori as Primate of the Episcopal Church in the United States boil down to a belief that women are second rate and only worthy of being spiritual handmaids, and not ecclesiastical leaders. But obviously, according to an article in the Guardian, there are people out there who think this:

The Rev Martyn Minns, a British-born conservative evangelical who has been active in opposing the church's leadership over its support for homosexual clergy, particularly its election three years ago of the gay bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, issued a statement saying: "It is sad. She will bring into sharp relief the difference between being an Episcopalian and being an Anglican. It is not clear how she can do anything other than lead the Episcopal church in walking apart from the rest of the communion. She has my prayers."

Wow. I guess I'm glad for once to be an American Episcopalian and not a British Anglican. And I was shocked to see that the Anglican church still hasn't resolved the conflict over the appointment of women as bishops.

Just as bad, but less surprising, is that the Roman Catholic Church has been bullying and threatening the Anglican church to sever ties with it if women are appointed as bishops.

Uh, did I miss something, but wasn't the Anglican church formed because some king didn't want the Pope telling him what to do?

This whole thing makes my blood pressure go up. It's bad enough that gays get bashed by "christians," but hell, I expect it. Can we really still be arguing about whether it's appropriate for women to be bishops?

Feh.

The Swedish word for the day is kyrkan. It means the church.

- by Francis S.

It's time to make amends. Because I've been sadly shirking my duties. I was interviewed awhile back on Schlockholm, and I failed to put in a link. Tsk, tsk.

And now I've been, uh, probed again, this time by Nathaniel of the blog film experience, with a bunch of movie questions, natch.

The hardest part was when he asked me who would play me in a movie of my life. Not only was the husband stumped when I asked him, but after I called up A., the TV producer, she couldn't come up with anyone either. It was her fiance, C., the fashion photographer, who finally hit on the right person: John Malkovich.

So, who would play you in the movie of your life?

The Swedish word for the day is frågetecken. It means question mark.

- by Francis S.

The difference between men and women:

Merck had originally hoped to get the vaccine approved for use in boys. But although women have routinely allowed swabs to be taken of their vaginal cells, the company found that men rebelled against the use of emery boards to collect cells from their penises. Researchers eventually discovered that jeweler's-grade emery paper effectively removed cells without alarming men and were able to complete their studies.

("U.S. Approves Use of Vaccine for Cervical Cancer", New York Times, March 9, 2006.)

The Swedish word for the day is gynekolog. It means gynecologist.

- by Francis S.

Who would have guessed it? The biggest threat to U.S. citizens isn't the war in Iraq, terrorism and security breaches, or even high [sic] taxes. It is hosts of crazy people burning the flag and great big homos who want to get married. At least according to George W. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who have been spouting off on measures on each of these issues that will be voted on in the U.S. Senate this week. In speaking of the proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution to restrict marriage and the rights of marriage to heterosexuals, Frist was quoted in the Hartford Courant as saying: "[Marriage], more than any other [institution], concerns the well-being of our future, of our children, of the states that my colleagues and I represent - indeed of this country."

The Swedish word for the day is skamlös. It means shameless.

- by Francis S.

I used to despair at trying to explain the phenomenon of the Eurovision Song Contest to Americans, it just seemed to defy description.

But my new friend, the children's book author, reminded me that this is no longer true.

"American Idol," he said.

Now why didn't I think of that? Because really, if you imagine it in terms of countries instead of people brimming over with insecurity, delusions of grandeur and a warped sense of self-worth and what is worthy of attention, trying their best to manufacture something that can be sold to the greatest number of people possible, well, there you have Eurovision.

To my surprise, this year the contest was won by a joke: Finland's, uh, "heavy metal band," Lordi. As we sat with A. the TV producer, her sister, C. the fashion photographer, the former football player and A.'s parents, everyone thought that it was sort of nice that Finland won, but they hated the song, everyone except the minor royal who thought it was all great.

I was, after the fact, disappointed not in the Finnish song, but that a much funnier joke, Iceland's "Silvia Night," didn't qualify for the finals. Especially after the actress playing the part of Silvia referred to Sweden's slightly scary born-again Christian contestant as ugly, old and a fucking bitch.

The Swedish word for the day is schlager. There is no real translation in English, but it is a word no doubt stolen from the German, and is a certain type of cheesy pop song that occasionally transcends its kitschness so far as to become indelibly printed on the culture.

- by Francis S.