Last night we sat up late eating caviar on toast and drinking white wine. Swedes prefer löjrom - whitefish roe, the best coming from Kalix up in the north of Sweden - to Russian beluga caviar. Our neighbor L., the chef, had styled food for a shoot with various caviars and while she'd given away the expensive Russian stuff to the photographer, she had saved the löjrom for us to have together.



We got to talking about self actualization, as we seem always to do with L. and her boyfriend P.



"When I moved to New York," L. said, "I was a bitch and stupid. I was such a perfectionist." She had worked at a renowned restaurant in New York. "They prepped the food way ahead of time on the weekend, and I would come in and say it wasn't good enough and throw it away. And this was to people who'd been working there for three years."



She was all of 21 years old when she had arrived. She had argued with the chef, who is well-known in Sweden because of his restaurant in New York. She had argued with everyone, and no one liked her.



Now, at the ripe old age of 27, she's learned that she was crazy when she was 21.



"I was crazy," she said.



She believes that she had too many unresolved inner conflicts then.



She believes that one of the problems with the world is that people expend too much energy trying to change things they can't change instead of fixing things inside themselves. That they worry about the Palestinians getting a fair deal, or a man getting stoned to death in Nigeria, instead of making their beds in the morning.



The husband wasn't buying this because in fact I make our bed in the morning, not him.



I told L. that I kind of agree with her; and yet it's sometimes hard to say how far our responsibilities to others extend.



And then we ate strawberries, without sugar.



The Swedish word for the day is ansvarig. It means responsible.



- by Francis S.

In one breath I claim I belong to no culture, in the next breath I'm getting all hot and bothered about religion rearing its ugly head yet again in America: the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of government subsidies of private - mostly religious - schools in the form of vouchers for parents who send their children to such non-public schools.



Does anyone else find it ironic that the Supreme Court has just decided that a bunch of priests and nuns deserve government handouts to molest, oops, I meant teach our children?



The Swedish phrase for the day is nu kan vi få betala, tack. It means can we pay now, please.



- by Francis S.

I got those little-brother-left-for-Paris-yesterday blues.



The Swedish word for the day is bröllopsresa. It means honeymoon.



- by Francis S.

"How do you find it living here?" asked F., the freelance art director, as we sat at a table or under a tent or on a rock sometime during midsummer.



After three and a half years living in Stockholm, people still ask me whether I like it here in Sweden. I always answer with a yes. I like it because I'm happily married, no doubt. And I like it because I have an interesting job and a life of my own outside my marriage. These are probably the three biggest factors.



But I also like it because Swedish culture agrees with me, or rather I agree with Swedish culture. Which is not to say that I am really a part of the culture. I feel rather outside the culture, but not in a dismaying or alienated way; I'm just not a Swede, and never will be. In fact, I feel outside American culture as well by this point. I'm a man without a culture, but I think being a homosexualist rather prepares one for living outside a culture (regardless of whether one believes in a gay culture or not, the vast majority of gay people live much of their lives as outsiders in many key ways).



Being without a culture certainly allows me to be lazy - I don't feel I have enough of a toehold in the culture to be able to make accurate and fair judgments about political issues, for example, and so I'm not burdened with having to make the effort of finding out more or trying to change things one way or another, something I most definitely felt when I had a culture. It makes me sound like a bum, though, doesn't it?



So, how do l find it living here?



Well, it's like, uh, life. (Apologies to Lorrie Moore.)



The Swedish phrase for the day is svårt att säga. It means difficult to say.



- by Francis S.

On Sunday, we had paella at H.'s apartment out in Stocksund, a well-to-do suburb of Stockholm. Eating paella beside us was Sweden's answer to Barbara Walters - a bit more intellectual and far to the left of Barbara, she has interviewed everyone from Moamar Qaddafi to Leonard Cohen.



She had just gotten back from the States, where she was doing a story on Steve Lofton and Roger Croteau's fight to adopt their foster child, and a follow-up story to one she had done 11 years ago on a family of white supremacists in Georgia. Eleven years later, it had hardly changed.



"I think racism is getting worse," the Swedish Barbara Walters said.



I am an optimist on the issue of racism. I've always felt that, slowly but surely, two steps forward and one step back, we move in the right direction. Yes, it can be discouraging sometimes, with right-wing parties gaining a foothold in Europe because of their anti-immigrant stances. With the U.S. Department of Justice using the current climate of fear to do away with due process. And yet, we move forward, things are better than they were 20 years ago; it's just that positive change also brings out the worst in some people.



Am I wrong, is racism on the increase?



The Swedish phrase for the day is jag vet inte, faktiskt. It means, I don't know, actually.



- by Francis S.

Midsummer was what it was supposed to be: alternating downpour and sunshine, one meal ending only for another meal to start, endless conversations in English or Swedish or French about soccer and Palestinians and where to eat in Paris and how expensive it is to buy a flat in London. We even managed to learn and sing the chorus of a nonsense song in Bengali, which an Indian guest quite effectively made into a drinking song. (We couldn't come up with an appropriate American song - "A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall" just seemed a bit, well, long and puerile; at least the English and the Swiss who happened to be there failed to come up with English or Swiss drinking songs, so we weren't alone in our dereliction to sing.)



My beloved little brother earned his midsummer chops by standing in rain that was coming down like bolts of cloth unfurling, one in a group of four people soaked to the skin and desperately fastening birch boughs to the midsummer pole so that we could all dance around it later. Which we did, eight hours or so later, with great gusto and like little children.



I managed to scrape myself up good, stepping at 1:30 a.m. out from under the tent erected in the front yard of the farmhouse and sliding down a ditch and coming up the other end and smashing into the pavement. Oh the blood, oh my poor hands, oh my sore ribs.



The Swedish word for the day is fest. It means party.



- by Francis S.

The dog days of summer are here:



1. My friend K., who lives in Boston, has become a pawn of the puppy Internet trade. She is now the proud mother of an adopted baby boxer named Alice. There was a chubby little boy in all the pictures of Alice that K. had been sent beforehand, but interestingly enough he was not in the cage with Alice when she arrived. K. was relieved.



"I guess he could have slimmed down with a lot of games of fetch on the beach," K. said.



And, K. did an evil thing that I told her not to. She sent pictures of Alice to the husband's e-mail account. I told her that I would remove all traces if I found them, but I wasn't diligent enough.



"I want one," the husband said when he read the e-mail, his voice all dreamy and wistful and full of pleading.



Me, I was raised by parents who grew up on farms, parents who believe that animals have a job to do, and that job is outside, be it a cow, a pig, a dog or a cat. I like animals well enough, but I've managed to inherit my parents rather, er, distant love of animals. I am not big on the idea of having a boxer in an apartment in the city.



"Hee hee," K. giggled when I confronted her. "It's just a good thing that he can't see Alice in person, because believe me, she is so cute he would need psychiatric care."



2. My beloved little brother and his wife the Rebel arrived last night, 30 kilo suitcase in tow and bearing pictures of the wedding (I liked them so very much because I looked so nice and thin even though I'm not nice and thin. Oh, and everyone else looked pretty good, too, especially the very photogenic bride and groom.)



As we sat up late, drinking wine and sipping gazpacho, the Rebel told me about her friend Karen and Karen's girlfriend Susan.



"They love their dog," she said. "And now it looks like they're going to pay a big wad of money to have one of the dog's lungs removed. The dog looks just fine but apparently this is not so. One of my friends said 'that dog is circling the drain.'"



Circling the drain?



The Swedish word for the day, of course, is hunden. It means the dog.



- by Francis S.