Last night we had dinner in Östermalm at a little trattoria. Perhaps it was a bit elegant - eight tables with white tablecloths, simple candles and menus with fancy script - to be called a mere trattoria, I suppose it was more of a real restaurant, where we celebrated the birthday dinner for P., the father of the friend from London and the closest thing I have to a father-in-law.

We sat, eating perfect vegetables - my mother claims that a restaurant should be judged by its vegetables - and talking all at once, the husband and I, P. and his wife E., and the friend from London who was here to do a photo shoot for H&M.

"Ingrid is 76 and she lives all by herself," P. told me, speaking about one of his neighbors on the island where the family summer house is, formerly the farmhouse of his grandparents. "She has no indoor plumbing - she still uses an outhouse, and she gets her water from a stream. She hasn't been to the city in five years."

I am astonished, as P. has hoped I would be, that there is still at least one Swede in the year 2002 who lives without running water.

Tomorrow, we leave at 10:30 a.m. on a plane that will take us to Chicago, where we will arrive at noon, nine hours after we left. We'll be back in a week.

Happy Thanksgiving.

- by Francis S.

The Swedish word for the day is Hannes. It is a boy’s name, rather uncommon, and happens to be the name of the son of R. and J.



Hannes will be 12 hours old today at 3 p.m. central European time. Go ahead, read more about Hannes and his parents and leave your own birthday greetings.



- by Francis S.

Have I mentioned that the husband and I are time optimists?



Have I also mentioned that the husband and I are, in fact, time idiots?



Yesterday, the husband had to be up early to go deal with some carpenters at work, who would be coming at 7 a.m. He set the alarm for 6:15, and got up without too much prodding from me. He left the house in the usual late-Fall pitch darkness, and made it there by 6:45. After nearly an hour of waiting, furious, he called up the foreman and got an answering machine. It was at this point he looked at his phone and noticed that the time, an hour after he’d arrived, was 6:45.



He had forgotten, for some reason, that he’d failed to set his alarm clock back when the time changed. Three weeks ago.



Time idiots, that’s us. Or maybe just lazy idiots.



The Swedish phrase for the day is kvart i sju, which would be written numerically as 6:45.



p.s. those bi-coastal wonders, East West, are back up and running in a new magazine format.



- by Francis S.

Last night, we met the guy from the Goethe Institute and his husband the South African publicist, as well as A. the assistant director and her fiancée, C., the photographer at a crowded table at Il Tempo, a restaurant the husband has been trying to get me to go to for years. We toasted to the promotion at work of the guy from the Goethe Institute, then off we ran to go see Hable con ella.



It always takes some emotional preparation to see an Almodóvar film, although I am inevitably impressed once I actually see it. Last night was no exception. It was melodramatic, strange, desperate, moving, a bit overwrought and had the usual perversely hopeful ending. Interestingly, he’s dropped the camp completely, which, depending on your perspective, allows for more subtlety of emotion. And he seems to have stopped giving the city of Madrid such a flamboyant role in his films as well – the hot oranges and pinks and reds are considerably toned down. Instead you have the Argentinian actor Darío Grandinetti, who is superb, his eyes and mouth constantly betraying a terrible and profound sadness, but ultimately not an inconsolable sadness.



It was Almodóvar who made me want to live in Spain. And although I hated and loved it all at once, I definitely was not disappointed when I finally did live there.



The Swedish phrase for the day is rörd till tårar. It means moved to tears.



- by Francis S.

Swedes seem to have an innate love of California, particularly Los Angeles. It is, no doubt, the promise of such endless sun. (Me, though a Chicagoan by upbringing and nature, I have the east-coast horror of L.A., a place which seems to value the buffed and tanned surface of things and deplores the intellectual. I'm a terrible snob when it comes to L.A. and obviously don't mind pissing off a good many people by saying so.)



Unlike Swedes, the promise of endless sun scares me. I love the changing of the seasons. Like the tremendous Frankenstein Christmas tree - put together from smaller trees - that is being put up on Gamla Stan's waterfront, a meter away from the spot where we played boule the past summer with the husband's agent: a perfect juxtaposition, icon of summer next to icon of winter.



The Swedish word for the day is strålande. It means radiant.



- by Francis S.

Sex makes the Internet go round. And you love to read about sex, don't you? I know I do. Even when I'm shocked when someone like Jane announces to the world that, in a fit of debauchery and after perhaps a few too many bottles of wine, she kissed a man for the first time. And then slept with him. (Uh, well, she only really did sleep with him, nothing more.)

Which put me in mind of my own days of debauchery. I did have a girlfriend when I was in my last years of high school. And we did sort of, well, get naked together. Which was fun, actually, although not nearly as fun as it was, and still is, to get naked with some guy, which these days would mean my husband, if you don't include the visits to the doctor, which actually are not more fun than being naked with a girl.

The last woman I got naked with was a certain MJ, when I was 22. I was supposed to be at home with my then-boyfriend. Instead, I got drunk with MJ and ended up at 7 a.m. the next morning hungover and smelling like sex. With a woman. My then-boyfriend was not amused. He never quite forgave me for it, not in the 13 years we were together.

So, my pretties, it's really easy for us homosexualists to write about crossing the line into decency and respectability, our fellow homosexualists are rarely shocked by such revelations. And, I am ashamed to say, I am in fact unduly proud of the fact, as if it made me more of a man. (I hate it when I exhibit this kind of vague internal homophobia, but what the hell. It's how I feel.)

Now it's your turn. Fess up. I want to hear about the last time all you big girls and big boys crossed the line, whichever line it may be for you.

Be brave.

Be honest.

Be really explicit and dirty. C'mon, titillate me. I could really use some entertainment these days.

- by Francis S.

Yesterday, as the husband and I were out shopping for clothes, for presents to take with us to America, for CDs and books and generally enjoying the fact that we had gotten up and out of bed and onto the streets before ten on a grey Saturday morning, we ended up in a kitchen store looking at monstrously large white salad bowls and chargers and coffee cups. Which gave me the idea of having a dinner party with all this outsized china and silver serving spoons and forks and knives. Wouldn't it be fun? The trick would be coming up with food that takes up volumes on a plate, but is reduced to nothing in the stomach. Soufflés? Rocket salads? Turkey drumsticks?



The Swedish verb for the day is att duka. It means to set the table.



- by Francis S.