I keep forgetting to write about my stalker story, which goes something like this:



A couple of weeks ago, my mobile phone rang and on the other end was a voice speaking in low tones, and about all I could understand were the words ''Daniel'' and ''hetalinjen.''



I said, jag tror att du har ringt fel* and the voice went on and I soon had to switch to English, I just couldn't understand the whispering voice.



It turned out that this Daniel seemed to think that we had talked on the previous Friday and I had given him my phone number. I said that I would not likely have been talking on any, er, hotline given that I was on my way from Athens to Stockholm then.



But, he asked me, you are gay aren't you?



And I said, well, yes I am gay, but that has nothing to do with this. (Did my voice give it away or what? O, the shame... and then the shame at being ashamed because that is surely internalized homophobia, dammit!)



On the other end there was a silence, laden with disbelief that I was denying that I had talked to the insistent Daniel.



Nonetheless, he did finally get off the line.



The husband was not amused. Neither was I, actually, it was rather unnerving. My first thought was that it was a prank played by M. But the husband found this very unlikely. And actually, it seems a bit too nasty and not funny enough for him. So, we went to bed.



Then, to my horror, the next morning there was an SMS on my phone: CALL ME I,AM GAY YOU ARE GAY LET,S METT.CALL 55 55 55 DANIEL.



I had a stalker. Yikes!



I immediately sent an SMS back saying that I was happily married, that I wasn't interested, to leave me alone.



He has. But he's still out there, somewhere. The weird thing is how did he get my number? I see three possibilities: first, someone else could have pulled my number out of thin air, a mere coincidence; second, it could still be a joke, though no one's admitted to that as of yet; third, it could be someone actually trying to get between me and the husband. (I do think it's probably the first, he sounded awfully young and scared.) But I've got his number, literally, so if he calls again it's straight to the police (that's what my friend Å. said, ''straight to the police'' were her very words).



The Swedish word for the day is läskigt, which means creepy.



-by Francis S.

*I believe you have the wrong number.

Oh, and here is a much more useful lesson in Swedish than you will ever find at this site, courtesy of Emma at Miramis, sister domain of Not My Muse, which also hosts Tread Softly. (There, that covers all the bases I hope for Anja, Lexi, et al.)



-by Francis S.

This blog twin thing seems kind of clique-y and, well, not being a member of any of the cliques that seem to exist in the blog world, adding my URL isn't likely to get me anything, and I'm not sure what the purpose of it is anyway except to get some extra attention. But, I shamelessly added my name anyway - I guess I still in my (assuredly pathetic when it comes to this kind of thing) soul want to be famous to 15 people, or famous to however many it takes to be declared a twin, although I can't for the life of me imagine who I could possibly be twinned with.



- by Francis S.

The regular fixed-line phone - as they say in the business - (as opposed to the mobile phone or cell phone, if you're reading this in the U.S.) is not working for some reason. Not that we're good about using this phone... I finally put a message on it saying that the caller should ring us on our mobile phones because we never listen to the message on the regular phone. (There will be an entire lesson later on Swedes and the use of mobile phones sometime in the near future.)



Anyway, when I woke up from my wool-tortured slumber at A.'s apartment last night, I noticed there was a message on my phone, which turned out to be my beloved little brother (who is, well, considerably bigger than I am, just littler in age, I guess) who had run into my ex on the street in D.C. They'd had lunch and now the ex wants my address in order to send me a letter. Which I suppose I will allow, since I'm curious as to what the hell he has to say to me. Our last communication was a letter from him that consisted of one sentence, - ''This is it.'' - and a check in payment for the grand piano that I'd sold with great difficulty because he wouldn't let me in the house in Dupont Circle, where the piano stood in the bay window, nor would he cooperate to be there at any specific time so possible buyers could stop in and see it. The whole thing was supposed to be negotiated through the next-door-neighbors, although I put my foot down on that and he finally relented. That particular letter seemed to succintly denote that, well, I shouldn't expect any more letters or send any of my own. Which was fine with me, if a little harsh in tone.



So, what the hell is he going to say now, more than five years after we split up?



And what the hell did he talk about at lunch with my poor little brother, who lived with us on several occasions and has, at best, rather ambivalent feelings about the ex, I'd suspect?



- by Francis S.

The weekend tastes so sweet after a long week - one of our two main English-language copyeditors was over here so I spent the week running meetings with her and every last damned editor at the office, first here in Stockholm and then down in Lund. This on top of the regular work that then has to be crammed in around the edges, including a session with a fellow invandrare - immigrant/ foreignerwho's only lived in Sweden six months and seems to be in a state of shock for a host of reasons, one of these being the deceptive similarity of Stockholm and its inhabitants to Anglo - U.K., U.S., Australian, Canadian, New Zealand - cultures: they are not the same at all, though they do appear quite similar on the surface, what with the excellent English-speaking skills, the t.v. programs from the U.S. (''The Sopranos'' and ''The West Wing'' and countless others), the music. That he doesn't need to prove himself in the way he's trying to prove himself, that he needs to tone it down in fact because in Sweden it's quite important not to seem to make yourself seem better than anyone else, and in fact its not at all the goal of people to become boss. I also had to make sure he realized that I'm not going to fire him because he's going through some kind of personal crisis and it's affecting his work.



Anyway, that was the week, in small part.



Then, when I arrived back from Lund at Arlanda airport, whisked the copyeditor and her husband into the train, got them checked back into the hotel, went back to the office at 5:30 and sent out some emergency e-mails because I hadn't had time to call a few people while I was down in Lund... after all this, we rushed off to A.'s apartment for dinner, which included S. and her new husband I., the son of Kurdish rebels (though he grew up in Sweden). I, quite rudely, zonked out on the couch shortly after the meal was finished (I blame the red wine), though I did manage to have some chocolate cake and dip into the huge bowl of godis that was put out (and I blame these very same godis and all their little cousins for the fact that S. commented that I seemed to have, ahem, gained a little weight in the general stomach area. I guess I need to get my sad ass to the gym).



Apparently, after I fell asleep, there ensued a huge argument about Israel, complete with namecalling (''you zionist, you'') and threats of making people read Noam Chomsky, all carried on in unfriendly tones and breaking all Swedish etiquette rules that forbid the discussion of politics (I blame this rule for my utter lack of comprehension when it comes to Swedish politics and the seven political parties represented in the Riksdag).



When I woke up, those damned wool trousers I was wearing making me feel extremely itchy and hot, A. said ''Did the shouting wake you up?'' She was very amused when I said no, it was, er, those damned wool trousers.



- by Francis S.

It's time for another lesson in Swedish culture. The subject is food (inspired by yami, proprieter of green/gabbro, a blog that is some kind of fifth cousin twice removed to this one). Sweets, to be precise.

2. Goodies. Swedes have an endearingly childish love of candy. Having a sweet tooth myself, I find this a very attractive trait. The word for candy is godis and it is pronounced just like the word goodies except that the final -s- really does sound like a soft, unvoiced -s- and not like the harder, voiced -z- sound (i.e. in English, it sounds like goodeze, but in Swedish it sounds like go-diece). There are candy stores all over the place and in fact, two of them within a half block of my apartment, including one that has been there since the husband was a little boy. These candy stores have bins of candy of many different types, sometimes a hundred or more, and everyone helps themselves using large plastic spoons, pouring the candy into paper bags which are then weighed at the checkout. (You can also find these candy bins at seven-eleven, at the grocery store, the movie theater, the video rental store, and I'm sure other places I'm forgetting). It's a common sight to see adults walking around with yellow-and-red-clown-patterned or pink-and-white-striped bags of candy.



The candy falls into several categories.



There's chocolate, of course, although most of that is not of a very good quality. My favorite chocolates are in fact the Finnish chocolates made by Fazer - little bite-sized pieces wrapped in paper; Geisha is the best, it has a hazelnut cream filling.



There are also a lot of wine gum/ gummi bear/ gumdrop types of candy. They come in all the usual flavors such as lemon and orange, as well as favorite Swedish flavors such as pear. They are shaped like a child's pacifier, or pieces of fruit, or frogs, or simply little discs or lozenges.



My favorites are the sours. Most of these are a variety of the wine gum/ gummi bear/ gumdrop type, and they are shaped like fish, or soda bottles, or keys. They also have sour chestnuts, which are fruit- flavored hard- on- the- outside- soft- on-t he- inside lozenges, sort of a cross between an overgrown skittle and a sourball.



Then there is the licorice. There is sweet licorice - most notable are the licorice rats - and there is salt licorice.



Since I first arrived in Sweden and tried turkisk pebar, I've wondered who first decided that this was a palatable combination, and how did they in fact convince a whole nation that salt (and not just regular salt, I think I could handle regular salt, this seems to have some horrible ammoniac quality to it) and licorice go together like, uh, the pope and a shit in the woods. Or something like that.



So, the final point of this lesson is, unless you know what you are doing, do not be convinced by some laughing Swede to sample any candy that looks suspicious (i.e. nasty little hard greyish-brown dusty disks, grey nubbly gum-droppy things, grey discs with a salty peace sign on them, you get the picture).

- by Francis S.

When I was in Greece, I was reading Down There on a Visit by Christopher Isherwood. He's an excellent memoirist, most of the books of his that I've read are very autobiographical, and he's written much about Berlin in the early thirties. But as I read this book, lying on a beach next to the husband and who knows how many others reading their own books or sleeping or talking, I thought to myself how the world today is so much a smaller place, people are so much closer together that the kind of war - and build up to it - that he writes about wouldn't happen now. I thought how different those times were, and wondered if he lived with a sense of foreboding as to what might happen, and thought how I live absolutely in a time where I have no sense of foreboding about anything other than the next week's work, that life these days is so sure. And now, of course, the surety is gone, at least in part. Just how much, that is the question.



The Swedish word for the day is kriget. It means the war.



- by Francis S.