Sober on New Year's Eve? Surely you jest!

You've gotta love surveys. Whether it's the oh-so-scientific surveys conducted on newspapers' websites ("What party do you plan on voting for?" asked DN.se, the results of which can immediately be deemed completely pointless) or the ones we used to get in our student post boxes at Olaf from clearly naive psychology students ("How much money do your parents make?" one asked in a survey that was about how we were paying our tuition, without any question about whether or not our parents were actually contributing).

A survey on DN.se's homepage today asks "Hur ska du ta dig hem på nyårsafton?" (How do you plan on getting home on New Year's Eve?). The choices offered me are taxi, bus/train, on foot or bike, hiring a "fyllechaffis" (a person to drive you because you're drunk yourself), I'm staying home, or other.

The possibility of driving oneself or riding with a friend is apparently not an option, as staying sober (at least without getting paid for it) is clearly unthinkable...

Gender Equality

Another example of an article where the author throws out an inaccurate generalization about the U.S. in order to support her otherwise pretty shaky thesis: The Economic Crisis can Bring us More Equality.

The program I studied in order to get my Swedish teaching degree was called Aspirantutbildningen, and was specifically for immigrated academics who wanted to become certified teachers in Sweden. The majority of the participants were women, though not overwhelmingly so (a higher percentage of our class was men than in the corresponding teaching program for "natives"). We came from quite a variety of different cultures, from the U.S. and England to several from Iraq, Syria and Bosnia. We had lived in Sweden for varying amounts of time, from 2 years in my case and the case of the girl from England (who is now one of my dearest friends) to 14 years or more for others. Some of my classmates were in their early twenties, and the two ladies from Russia were in their 50s.

We got along with each other very well, and it was a fun class to be in. We often bristled at our classes about democracy and equality and tolerance, though -- especially the "Democracy and value questions" class that was mandatory for us but not even offered for the Swedish teaching students. When we had a visiting scholar come to our class and lecture on the subject of gender equality (jämställdhet), we were in fairly unanimous agreement: her lecture was shit, and we were sick of the Swedish idea of what gender equality means.

We took this up with our teacher afterwards, and got into a long discussion with him about the same example that came up and was hotly debated (with most of us firmly on the one side and the lecturer, and later our male teacher, on the other side) during the lecture: it's okay that most teachers are women. It's okay if there are more women that want to stay home with their kids than there are men who want to do so, and it's okay that there are more male CEOs than female CEOs. It's okay -- and this is where we really made people cover their ears and scream "OH NO THEY DI'IN!" -- for men and women to want different things and to believe that biology plays a roll in those desires. Feminism, according to us, is the view that everyone, regardless of gender, should be able to make all these choices for themselves, and without feeling ashamed of their choices, and that the Swedish view of gender equality was therefore, ironically enough, often at odds with the true spirit of feminism.

That was our side, of course. The other side was to tell us that we just THINK we chose to be teachers and that we would like to work part time in order to be home with our children, but that we're really brain-washed by society and don't know what's best for us. It honestly never ceases to blow my mind that telling me I shouldn't be what I want to be because I don't know what's best for me sounds like feminism to some people.

Anyway, the point is that our teacher -- who I liked don't get me wrong -- was baffled by our attitude, an attitude that seemed to him to be a classroom full of foreign women who were just dying to subject themselves to the big nasty patriarchy. He saw it as a sign that we didn't understand that we were "living in a man's world" and that there was still work to be done. This is, as I understood it later upon private discussion with him, his reason for telling us a rather depressing story about a 13-year old girl from Motala who was liqoured up and raped by some adults and about the legal system's subsequent appallingly stupid and indifferent response to the incident.

So, the reason I start with this rather long discussion about this experience from my university days is so I can make the disclaimer: I am in no way under the illusion that any society, even the U.S. or Sweden, is the utopian ideal of gender equality and that I don't live in what is still "a man's world."

I do not deny that at least one very good point is brought up in the article: the fact that Volvo has had to lay off a bunch of people has been splashed across the media day in and day out and has launched floods of politicians into action. The fact that Coop is going to lay off 1000 people has not been treated nearly as seriously. The article is trying to say that this is because auto workers are mostly men and that grocery store workers are mostly women.

I'm sure there is truth in this. However, my first bit of devil's advocacy on that point is that we can't go around blaming only our politicians for the inconsistency. I had NO IDEA whatsoever that Coop was laying off people, which means the "fourth branch of government" -- the news media -- can take credit for seriously dropping the ball as far as responding equally to the two different incidents. I also think it's a far less fair comparison than the editorial writer suggests, partly because she has inaccurately said that 1300 people have been given pink slips at Volvo (adding up the several waves of "varsel" that have come out from Volvo gives a number much higher than 1300*), and partly because what we're talking about here is the possible bigger picture of both Volvo and Saab completely going under and all the domino-effect ramifications that can have for other industries and the Swedish economy. No one is concerned that some layoffs from Coop are going to shut down the entire business of buying and selling food in Sweden, and rightfully so. It may be an economic crisis, but we're still a spoiled western country -- we're not going to stop buying food, for crying out loud.

The main point of the editorial is to discuss whether or not an economic crisis will help or hurt the cause of gender equality. After first discussing what the author feels is the more obvious theoretical result -- that an economic crisis will force us into a sort of "panic" or "comfort" mode where gender stereotypes are embraced more tightly -- she then goes on to point out that the opposite can be the case, and gives examples of how many of gender equality's most important steps forward came during times of crisis in the 1900s. To show that gender equality can be "harmed" by good economic times, she says, "Alldeles nyss rådde, mitt i galnaste högkonjunktur, värsta hemmafruvurmen på decennier." Translated: "Just recently, right in the middle of the craziest of economic booms, we had the worst 'housewife craze' in decades." To show that gender equality can be "helped" by bad economic times, she says: "När män blir arbetslösa kan man tänka sig att deras hittills deltidsarbetande fruar kräver att få gå upp på heltid." Translated: When men lose their jobs, you can imagine that their part-time working wives demand to be able to work full time."

Again, while I have no problem with the author's basic thesis -- that an economic crisis can surely be both positive and negative for gender equality -- I bristle at the illustrative examples she uses (and the ironically chosen words) as to what is equality and what is not. I can't help but ask for the fifty-eleventh time what is so horrible about being a housewife if that's what you choose to be. Similarly, what is so horrible about working part time, and why on earth would a woman have to "demand" to her husband that he "allow" her to work full time? Why this 1950s assumption that a woman who works part time or stays at home does so because her husband has put her in her place? That she's sitting at home longing to work full time and that she requires a full-blown world crisis in order to have that opportunity? In a country where the men are constantly getting lambasted for not staying home enough, why is it so impossible to accept that a woman might choose to stay home and that she might consider the very possibility a freedom -- and consider working full-time during an economic crisis an unfortunate necessity rather than an opportunity? Why is it that the mere fact that women make a certain choice more often than men makes that choice an admirable one for men to make but a shameful one for women to make?

Now we come to the obligatory false generalization about America that seemingly has to be thrown into every editorial about society in order to sooth some sort of underlying little brother complex. After a paragraph that strikes me as both self-satisfied glorification of Swedes and Sweden, saying that Swedes are simply excellent at everything that's tolerant and modern while simultaneously missing the irony in the proposal to force immigrants to sign a contract stating that they will be just as Swedishly modern and tolerant, the author writes: "Kan det vara så enkelt som en fråga om var någonstans man hittar sin trygghet. Det är ju tryggheten vi kräver i oroliga tider och amerikanerna hittar sin trygghet i en bred mansfamn. Då får kvinnan krympa så att hon får plats där." Translated: "Could it be a matter simply of where we find security? It's security that we demand in uncertain times and Americans find their security in the protective arms of masculinity. Women have to shrink in order to fit in."

As usual, this mention of the U.S. comes seemingly out of left field -- it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere and just seems to be a strange mini-departure from the article's main argument. This goes hand-in-hand with the other "as usual": nothing is offered to support this wild generalization, which is understandable if it was just thrown in as a sort of egotistical verbal masturbation.

The author clearly holds to the definition of feminism and equality that claims we would have more of both if more CEOs and business executives were women, more nurses and teachers were men, and if all housework and child-rearing were shared so fanatically equally that number of square inches of floor mopped and grass cut were 50/50 to within the breadth of a human hair. This means I can't help but assume that she has no more experience with America than what she gets from her secret habit of uncritically viewing Jerry Springer and Ricky Lake. Otherwise she would know that the divide between "women's occupations" and "men's occupations" is not nearly as drastic in the U.S. and that women tend to go back to work quite quickly after having a baby in the States. Sure, the reason women go back to work right away and chuck their kids into daycare is because there isn't the almost year and a half of paid parental leave in the States that we're blessed with in Sweden, but I think Swedes need to stop providing that opportunity and simultaneously bitching and moaning that women are using it -- you can't have your frickin' cake and eat it, too.

Am I saying that women and men are more equal in the States than they are in Sweden? No. What I'm saying is that I don't believe there's more equality in Sweden, either; that there are several attitudes and laws in place in the States with the very purpose of securing more gender equality (for instance, that a woman who stays at home earns Social Security in the same amount as her husband) that would be called "kvinnofällor" -- traps for women -- in Sweden. That there are clearly several different ways to define what makes men and women equal. That you can be practical and actually do things to solve actual diseases -- like the fact that women earn less for the same work than men -- or you can bang your head against the wall trying to patch up the resulting symptoms of those diseases that you, arguably mistakenly, perceive as problems -- like the fact that women use more of the state-provided parental leave than men do or the fact that more women will choose to stay home with their children than men.

The simple fact of the matter is that I rarely felt limited by my gender before moving to Sweden. The times that I have felt manipulated or discriminated against because of my gender have come pretty exclusively from people who think they're "encouraging me" or helping me "realize my potential". I spent two miserable years as a PhD student in mathematics because everyone that I ever looked up to was totally right about my possessing the talent to be a professional mathematician but totally blind to the fact that I didn't WANT to be one. It was such a "waste" for a person as smart or talented as me to become "just a teacher" that my desire to teach was met with an assumption that I must be joking or being sarcastic; it was half-subtly suggested that such a frivolous choice would be a let-down to women everywhere. But my worst experiences with being told what was right or wrong for me to do as a woman came after I had moved to this country, and in an eerie echo from arguments about why women shouldn't be allowed to vote or to learn how to read, I was told it was because someone else knows better than I do when it comes to what's best for me and what I really, actually want out of life. I understand that in its infancy feminism was about women getting jobs and the same jobs as men hold. But there comes a point where it's time for feminism to grow up and return to its very axioms: that every individual should have full and exclusive control over their own life choices, regardless of their gender. That more mature brand of feminism clearly hasn't come in this county. So I don't think it's time for us as Swedes to have yet another session of patting ourselves on the back and saying "We're just so awesome and equal and tolerant and open to new ideas, which is why ALL OTHER IDEAS ARE WRONG!"

---

*A quick search finds:
Sept. 30: Volvo anläggninsmaskiner "varslar" 500 employees (a warning that 500 people will be laid off)
Oct. 8: 3,300 employees at Volvo personvagnar
Oct. 23: 850 employees at Volvo Construction Equipment
Nov. 11: 900 employees at Volvo Powertrain

Boiling Point

Okay, now that I've started vent-blogging about stories in the Swedish news, it's getting difficult to stop.

I could easily write about what bullshit is coming from the Swedish Government (translation of Government with a big G for my parliamentarily challenged fellow Americans: the Administration) in the form of a recent pre-legislative study about gambling and who should be allowed to provide the service. But I'll leave Fredrik to roll his eyes prosaically at that one.

I could snort derisively at the fact that, according to this article on DI.se, Näringslivets etiska råd mot könsdiskriminerande reklam (Translation: Swedish Commerce's Ethical Council Against Sexual Discrimination in Advertising, *pant pant*) is... well, I don't know what they're doing, because I don't get who they are or what authority they have, but the long and short of it is that they're bitching about a Coca-Cola Zero TV ad that they think is sexist because it gives a tongue-in-cheek representation of the "perfect break-up," where the girl who's just been dumped says "Sure, no reason to stick to me where there are so many pretty girls out there. Call me when you want to have a good time," and then the guy walks away with 4 other hot girls. They complain that this is a blatant feeding of the stereotype that men are more interested in purely sexual relationships than women, and that the hot women are "scantily clad". I could roll my eyes and complain about how sexist it is that it's ALWAYS women in mascara ads, and point out that Magnum ice cream bars are marketed with TV ads that contain scantily clad women, but really, doesn't this one sort of take care of itself?

But the following article cannot be left without comment: Fetus Aborted by Mistake. Here's the short translation: a 28-year old woman sought treatment at a hospital in Stockholm because she was having trouble getting pregnant ("involuntary childlessness"). The doctor found that she has "cell changes" in her uterus and therefore performed a D&C. He apparently didn't realize that she actually was pregnant, and that during the D&C he scraped out the fetus. The National Board of Health and Welfare is gravely critical of the doctor, thinking he ought to have done a pregnancy test and paid attention to the patient when she mentioned that her period was 2 weeks overdue. They demand better routines and documentation.

But, jaw-droppingly, the last sentence in the article reads: "Men det vetenskapliga rådet på Socialstyrelsen tror inte att det inträffade inneburit några men för patienten och att hon bör kunna bli gravid igen."

Translation: "But the scientific panel at The National Board does not feel that the incident caused any injury for the patient and that she ought to be able to become pregnant again."

I want to point out that the word "men" that I've translated to injury suggests more of a general or even mental injury rather than purely a physical one. As in, it's the word that you would use if you said something liked "Walking in on his parents' bondage session scarred Billy for life."

I'm sorry, but what can I say? The only thing that seems to want to creep out of my dropped jaw is "FUCK. YOU."

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this here; perhaps this scientific panel's job is merely to state the purely practical medical facts, and perhaps by "men" they DID mean physical injury, i.e. physical chance to get pregnant again. But even in that case they're not being entirely serious, because having experienced an aborted or lost pregnancy, especially with a D&C involved, does actually change one thing or another for the woman's next pregnancy. Since she was seeking help for difficulty in getting pregnant, I think it's safe to assume she's going to want to be pregnant again. And believe me, after my experience, I've chatted with enough women who have had miscarriages and D&Cs and read enough about all the things that can go wrong during pregnancy to know that there's at least a slightly bigger chance of certain complications (infection and scarring that can cause infertility, pre-term labor and placenta acretia during a subsequent pregnancy, for example) if you've previously been pregnant, had an abortion, miscarried, or had a D&C.

But I can't help but read this sentence as a dismissal of even the psychological aspects of any harm that might have been done to the woman. I'm sorry, that brings me back to my original reaction. Fuck them right in the ear. People who know me are well aware of the fact that I'm a supporter of abortion rights, so they will not take the meaning of my following sentences incorrectly. I will say for the hundredth time this year that the ability to have a new baby does not erase the fact that the baby you already had inside you has died. A wanted baby is not just raw materials. In this case, the baby didn't just die because of a cruel and unexplainable fluke of nature, but because of human negligence. You have a woman who clearly WANTED a child, had also presumably required a long time in order to become pregnant, and then that was taken away from her because some idiots shouldn't be trusted with a white coat and a stethoscope.

I will forever see red whenever I think of what happened to me in the emergency room when I lost our "Beiron" and will always fantasize about finding that nurse and screaming at her about the pain I will carry with me for the rest of my life because of her. But at least I can always remind myself -- though I do not gain much comfort from it and do not feel it makes her actions any more excusable -- that her actions are not what caused our baby to die. In the case described in the article, I just have no words. Except of course for one last "Jebus on a scooter, fuck that doctor with a chainsaw" for good measure.

Suspicion Confirmed

A more thorough article about the school starting time study can be found at CNN: Falling asleep in class? Blame biology.

This article confirms my suspicion that we're talking about an earlier starting time than is typical at Swedish high school. The Kentucky school's original start time was 7:30 am, and another school in Minneapolis that had tried later start times originally started the school day at 7:15.

The article also suggests that the explanation for the improvement is the one I labeled as number 3 -- a biological factor regarding how teenagers produce melatonin. But that forces me to repeat the fact that the possible applications of this knowledge in Sweden are either a very short school day in the winter, switching from a summer to a winter break, or just accepting the fact that we live in a dark hell hole in the winter where people are tired all day no matter how much they sleep.

On another note, the article makes me feel like I've been cheated out of the proper melatonin/aging pattern. I had no problem getting out of bed for a 6:24 am school start when I was 16, only to later come home for a short break before going to a 6-hour cashiering shift at 3 pm. These days 3 pm is more likely to be the start of nap time, despite the fact that I lethargically ooze out of bed at 8 am most days. Ahh, to be a young whipper-snapper again...

Sleeping In

Another article from DN.se: Sleeping In Reduces Accidents.

The headline of the article is a bit misleading since, while the article does mention that a study of middle and high school students in Kentucky showed a decrease in traffic accidents for the kids involved, the main focus of both the study and the article was the fact that starting school one hour later led to more kids getting 8 hours of sleep a night and less tiredness in the classroom.

I remember hearing of a similar study when I was in high school myself, and I also remember that my reaction was the one mentioned in the article: if we're allowed to start school one hour later, then we'll just go to bed later, and nothing will be solved. I probably also was in the group of people that felt that getting up early was character-building for us youngins.

I don't know what to say today about the character-building part. I was a great student and it was difficult to get me to stay home from school even when I was nursing some sort of half-fatal lung infection, or that day I nearly broke my neck playing baseball in the rain in gym class (I had a math test I didn't want to miss!) -- and yet, nowadays I have difficulty dragging my ass out of bed to get to work at 9 am. So THAT much character couldn't have been built by the fact that our school day started at 7:22.

But it is that very fact -- that our school day started at 7:22 -- that makes me extremely skeptical in the face of the conclusion of the article. "Det är högst sannolikt att vi skulle uppnå lika goda effekter i Sverige med en senareläggning av skoldagen. Nu får ju inte svenska 16-åringar köra bil, så effekten här skulle snarare ses i en minskad trötthet och bättre funktionsförmåga i skolan, säger Torbjörn Åkerstedt." Translated: Torbjörn Åkerstedt, a professor in behavioral science, says it's "highly likely" that starting school later in the day would be beneficial to Swedish youths and their education.

The school day at the Swedish high school where I taught for 2 years started at 8:15 am. I don't know how it was at the test school in Kentucky, but my school day in high school started at 7:22 am. That's when the first bell rang, and the butts were supposed to be in those homeroom seats. Depending on what courses you choose to study, some of us started at 6:24 am, although that was voluntary masochism on our part. As far as I know, the 8:15 start is quite normal compared to other high schools in this area, and our 7:22 am start was quite normal for schools in the Twin Cities area.

The point is that it's very possible that most Swedish schools already begin their day one hour later than the schools in the named study. This begs that question -- what is it that makes the later start work better, and does it really translate to a similar improvement in Sweden if Swedish schools already start their days later?

It seems to me that the possible explanations for the improvement are:

1. The benefit is independent of time of day, being instead a result of the relatively later school start.
   
2. The benefit is NOT independent of time of day, but is rather a result of social factors and influences from surrounding society.
   
3. The benefit is not independent of time of day, but is rather a result of biological factors.

So what I mean in case number one is this: it wouldn't matter what time the school day started -- we would see the same increase in the kids' effectiveness and wakefulness and the same decrease in number of car accidents regardless of whether the start of the school day was shifted from 7 am to 8 am or from 8 am to 9 am. But if the number of kids who get 8 hours of sleep goes up from 36% to 50% (the benefit stated in the article) regardless of whether they're starting school at 8 am or 9 am, then obviously the average time at which the kids go to bed is directly correlated with the time they have to get up in the morning. That would seem to suggest that the bedtimes would eventually slide later and later after the change and that the benefits would therefore be only temporary.

What do I mean by the second case then? I mean that the specific time of day IS important -- that is, that you would see more or less benefits at the school that shifted from 7 am to 8 am than at the school that shifted from 8 am to 9 am, and that the underlying reason is social and societal factors such as when adults tend to go to work or when people typically eat dinner. But this is where the fact that the Swedish school day already has a later start than an American school day comes into play. If it is the mere fact that school starts at 8 am that works, then it ought to already be working in Sweden.

The same goes for case 3, in which it is the time of day that matters, but that it is biological rather than surrounding social factors that make it work. My argument on this point is similar to in point 2 -- that the Swedish school day already does start later -- but with the added issue of the vastly different sunrise and sunset times in Sweden. After all, if the benefits of starting school later are based on biological factors that are wholly independent of social calendar norms, then it must be the sun that's behind it all. But if you check out sunrise and sunset times in Kentucky and then compare them to those in Sweden, you'd be forced to conclude that the only thing for it is a school day of 11 am to 2 pm during the Swedish winter in order for there to be any hope of an open eye or two in the classroom. If this is the case, than I CAN actually buy that starting school at 9:30 am in Sweden would give about the same levels of sleep and wakefulness as starting at 8:30 am in Kentucky, without it being a matter merely of changeable habit. But then we're clearly looking at the wrong solution -- instead of starting the school day later, we should be changing the school YEAR. Summers in school, and winters off, would obviously be of more benefit than just shifting the existing school day one hour later.

Wouldn't THAT be popular! ;)

Integration

So, C# course over, weekend here -- thank god -- back to the business at hand. Integration.

So the study I linked in my last post -- Refugees Integrate Quicker if Allowed to Choose Own Residence -- shows that immigrants to Sweden integrate with Swedish society more quickly if they are allowed to choose for themselves where they will live. This will come as a shock to the "red-green" side of Swedish politics -- the socialist and far-left parties who have had power in Sweden for most of the last 100 years but who were kicked out of power by the liberal and moderate parties (read: Sweden's right wing) in 2006. Like in so many other cases, they believe that beautiful, symmetrical statistics are the solution to everything; to them, making sure immigrants are spread out over the country as much as possible -- and more importantly, forced to blend with Swedes rather than others from their home country -- was as obvious a goal unto itself and a solution to all the world's ills as making sure all workplaces have exactly 50% female employees.

To a person who has moved to Sweden from another country, it comes as absolutely no surprise that the integration process actually proceeds more quickly and smoothly if the immigrant is given the freedom to choose where they want to live, even if (ESPECIALLY if!) this means they ends up living with their own relatives and friends from their home country.

It's strange that this isn't obvious to a people that easily break into the top 10 for world's most reserved and shy. They imagine that immigrants will more quickly learn Sweden's language, customs, values, etc., if they have Swedish neighbors both to the left and to the right, as if people in this country go around chatting with their neighbors on a regular basis. In reality, people who merely say hello to their neighbors in this country tend to cause said neighbor to start walking on the other side of the street and casting about suspicious looks. And if Swedes aren't known for sparking up a friendly chat with Mr. Lars Gustafsson on the street, you can bet your savings that they're DEFINITELY not the types to strike up a friendly chat with Mr. Akhmed Mohammed. Perhaps the typical Swede who holds to this theory thinks "Well, if I moved to China, I'd go out and try to talk to people!" Perhaps you would. But a Swede moving to China is not the same thing as a Somali or an Arab moving to Sweden. If Lars Gustafsson moves to China, I can guarantee he hasn't done it as a refugee, and I'll even give you 95% confidence that he had a job lined up before he got there. Neither is Lars going to convince me that he will quickly learn Chinese or stop pining after knäckebröd. And if Lars has another comparison for me, one that involves him moving to a place any less exotic than China (I can just HEAR his story about his year in U.S. America on this tip of his tongue), then I don't want to hear it. Lars, you're embarrassing yourself.

The idea behind "Ankeborg doesn't have many immigrants -- perfect, we'll send this family of refugees there!" becomes more silly when you imagine Mr. Mohammed trying to find a job. A job is, after all, pretty much the very keystone of integration, if not in first place then an extremely close second to learning Swedish. Do the supporters of this theory of "residence quotas" or whatever you might call it imagine that it's easier to get a job if we send him to a place where the people aren't used to immigrants? Perhaps they imagine that Swedes react to new faces and accents by thinking "Wow, how cool! We have to hire him!" but then they've never met themselves. Perhaps Ankeborg doesn't have jack when it comes to industries that Mr. Mohammed is educated to work in? Not that Sweden gives a crap about what Mr. Mohammed is educated to do; he will be told that his foreign education is worthless and that he needs to redo it at a Swedish university in order for us to believe he knows anything -- and they think it's who his neighbors are that are helping or hindering his integration! -- but then the next problem is that Ankeborg doesn't have a college where Mr. Mohammed -- who probably has an advanced degree in nuclear physics -- can sit and learn about basic math and chemistry and feel degraded and disrespected.

No, the reasons that people from the same country tend to congregate in the same cities and housing areas is no more strange than the fact that urban places tend to contain more homosexuals and liberals and people with university educations; it's no more strange than the fact that almost every single one of my neighbors has a civil engineer's degree and works within 200 meters of my own workplace.

But the real problem, as is clear in the article, is not actually what city the immigrant lives in, who his neighbors are, etc., but whether or not he lives with his family. I get the idea behind this theory -- they see the foreign family as a crutch or an influence that is at odds with learning to speak Swedish or socializing with Swedes. Again, aside from the skepticism I've already described, I think it's a lack of imagination and an embracing of a widespread misunderstanding of how people learn languages that is behind this theory. The only thing achieved by immersing an already vulnerable person in a new language and a new environment without the benefit of a social support network is frustration and depression, and a frustrated, depressed person thinks that giving up looks very attractive. I don't think you can pretend that that kind of social support network can be provided by strangers that don't know your language and that represent everything you're frustrated and depressed about. In contrast, a person who moves here from another country and moves in with family and friends that have more experience with the country have an extremely valuable resource at their fingertips: people that they trust and that can translate not only words but even all aspects of society for them, comparatively and on exactly the level they understand. Just like the fact that a Swede can be the absolute worst teacher of the Swedish language and a recently taught foreigner can be the best, an integrated family member is the best possible ambassador for the immigrant's new country, and a native Swede's word ("Seriously, our country rocks") and experience ("But you have to take a kölapp... you know, a kölapp? Don't they have kölapps in your country? How odd.") mean quite little.

People who know about my situation might say, hey wait, you integrated really well, and you moved in with a Swede! Yes, I did. But I figure that the red-greens aren't suggesting that Ahkmed should actually move IN with a Swede. Plus, Fredrik isn't just a Swede, he's also my family, and a fluent speaker of American English. So he fits into both categories. And given that we've always spoken exclusively English at home, he fits far more into the "family" category than the "Swede" category. And as my English-speaking "crutch," he was vital in my successful integration. While I was learning Swedish, I always had someone that I could ask "How do I say this word in Swedish?" I always had someone to explain what I was reading or seeing on TV or what strange letters I got in the mail from Landstinget were about. I had someone who could help me make friends and be the "middle man" between me and the scary new world that I lived in. I had someone who fought for me when I was unfairly rejected from the course at the university that I had to study in order to become a teacher here. He supported me financially so that I could focus full-time on finishing that education, learning the language, and getting a job. No number of random Grade A Authentic Swedes surrounding me as neighbors, shop cashiers, co-workers, classmates, etc., could have done the job that he did with me. And if the fact that I melted in just fine despite living with English-speaking family isn't enough, then I ought to point out that my first 4 years here also had me surrounded by other immigrants in other ways -- in my Swedish course and my Teaching Program for Immigrants -- and in an environment where I spoke only my native language -- a year of English studies to round off my teaching degree.

Of course, whether or not I've integrated well is a subject that can be debated about 50 different ways. This is mostly because I don't think Swedes tend to remember what the goal of integration actually is. Some might not have seen the need for me to integrate at all. When I first moved here, people actually laughed at me when I called myself an immigrant. Why is that? I didn't speak Swedish, I didn't have a job, I wasn't a citizen, I'd moved here from a different country, I didn't even have a driver's license or understand the least little thing about how to get a bank account or buy stamps. That's well beyond the definition of "immigrant" I've got in my dictionary. But since I'm a white westerner, my giving myself the label of "immigrant" was humorous to them. Since that reaction tends to invoke stern looks and sterner words from me, I don't get it that often anymore. But it is the symptom of the larger problem that many Swedes tend to forget that integration is about making sure a new resident of Sweden can happily survive in and support themselves in this society -- it's about the language and about having a job and sending your kids to school. It's about having a ticket to society. It is NOT about making sure you dress like a Swede, eat like a Swede, and find Björn Gustafsson just as funny as everybody else does. My being accepted without even having to integrate first was not about whether or not I was comfortable with Sweden, but whether or not Sweden was comfortable with me. I wasn't going to bring in weird foreign foods or strange customs or anything else that they weren't comfortable with. In fact, in that respect, I was a dream immigrant, because I couldn't possibly bring anything here that they hadn't already voluntarily imported themselves.

The problem is that, even though this study now shows that giving the immigrant freedom to choose his residence not only doesn't hurt but actually helps his integration, most of the people who embrace the "quota" theory will not budge. It's not a group that I feel is often swayed by actual evidence, at least when that evidence doesn't fit with their view of how the world ought to work. Neither will my own reflections as an integrated foreigner mean anything to these self-convinced ivory tower experts -- we're talking here about people who can't even believe me when I say the U.S. doesn't have 52 states and that not all Americans celebrate Christmas on Christmas day. Honestly though, what would I know.

What needs to happen in Sweden in order for integration to actually work is what was promised several years ago but has yet to happen: the focus of the government's integration work needs to be not on the immigrants, but on the Swedes. People who have educated themselves in their home countries need to be respected as professionals when they get here, without being subjected to the brand of Swedish hubris that tells us human bodies or human minds or computers must be so different in another country that education in these areas can't be worth anything outside of Sweden's borders. Swedes need to be taught something that OUGHT to be obvious -- a person cannot learn a new language overnight, and that the fact that you speak half-assed English is for a myriad of reasons no argument for why you think a person freshly arrived from an Eastern European or Central Asian country ought to be fluent within months. Swedes need to learn that calling a kid who was born in Sweden to parents who were born in Sweden an immigrant just because she's got dark hair and a healthy tan is not "respectful of diversity" and is most certainly not going to help. We need to not act as if Sweden hadn't changed for hundreds of years before Ahkmed came here with his weird couscous and his fancy prayer rug. We need to stop inflexibly connecting "foreign" with "bad" and "good" with Sweden, which would require us to quit calling a woman who has lived here for several years and is fluent in Swedish "tyskan" ("The German lady") when she's charged with murder but calling the Greek winner of the Eurovision song contest a "svenska" just because she has an apartment in Göteborg.

To make a long story short, all I'm saying is, the line "Borg? Sounds Swedish," said by Lily in Star Trek: First Contact is one of the most ironically accurate lines ever spoken in a film, and since I ran into two NSF skinheads at the grocery store tonight, I felt like stream-of-consciousness bitching about it for a while.

Freedom works -- who knew?

I've written so much about American politics that I'm glad I have an opportunity today to write about Swedish politics, lest you all be denied a view of the super capitalist side of me and start thinking I'm a lefty pinko.

Here's a short article that was on today's DN.se: Refugees Integrate Quicker if Allowed to Choose Own Residence.

I'm currently taking a C# course with work, and we're about to start, so I'll leave you to debate amongst yourselves while I learn about Monitoring Applications by Using Instrumentation.

Thanksgiving, pt. 5

Seeing as today is the actual Thanksgiving, I figured I'd best finish writing about our early Thanksgiving.

After resting for an hour once the four casseroles were finished, I had to get back to work. First up was the appetizer, the wild rice salad.

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Wild Rice Salad
3 T sugar (3 msk socker)
1 T orange peel (1 msk apelsinskal)
2 T orange juice (2 msk apelsinjuice)
2 T apple cider vinegar (2 msk äppelcider vinäger)
1/2 t salt (1/2 tsk salt)
1/4 cup olive oil (0,6 dl olivolja)
1 t poppy seeds (1 tsk valmöfrön)
2 apples, peeled and diced (2 äpplen, skalade och tärnade)
Juice from 1 lemon (saft från en citron)
4 cups cooked wild rice, drained and cooled (1 l tillagad vildris, avrunnet och avkylt)
1/2 cup dried cranberries (1,2 dl torkade tranbär)
1/2 slivered almonds (1,2 dl mandelspån)
1 cup sliced mushrooms (2,4 dl skivade champinjoner)
1/2 cup green onions (1,2 dl salladslök)

Dressing: Mix sugar, orange peel, orange juice, vinegar and salt in a blender. While blending, slowly add oil until mixture is smooth and thick. Stir in poppy seeds.

Salad: Pour lemon juice on the apples and toss directly after chopping them up so that they won't turn brown. Then mix all ingredients together. Cover and let stand in the fridge for 2-4 hours so flavors blend.

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The salad was done at about 3:30, so it was time to prepare the turkey. I wanted the turkey done at 6:30, and Butterball claimed it would take 2 to 2 1/2 hours at 325 F in a convection oven, so I wanted it in by 4:15. No problem!

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Herb-rubbed Roast Turkey
1 T dried parsley (1 msk torkad persilja)
1 T dried sage (1 msk torkad salvia)
2 t dried rosemary (2 tsk torkad rosmarin)
1 t dried thyme (1 tsk torkad timjan)
1 t garlic powder (1 tsk vitlökspulver)
1 t salt (1 tsk salt)
1/4 t pepper (1 krm svartpeppar)
1/4 cup melted butter (60g smält smör)
1 10-12 lb turkey, fully thawed (1 avtinnad kalkon, 4-5kg)

If you've never made a turkey before, there are a few things you need to know. First, there's often a plastic bag inside the turkey that contains the giblets. This means the turkey's neck, heart, lungs, liver, and all kinds of lovely stuff. Needless to say, you'll want to remove this. (The giblets are often used to make gravy or stuffing; for gravy, you'll want to at this point throw them into a pot of water for boiling, but more about that later.) You'll also want to nip and tuck the bird properly so that it cooks evenly, but more about that after we slather it up.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F (160 degrees C). Mix all the herbs and spices together in a small bowl. If you want you can crush them up in with a mortar and pestle so that they get really fine and well blended -- this is why I prefer dry to fresh herbs. Brush the turkey all over with the melted butter, and then sprinkle the herb blend all over, turning the turkey to get all sides.

When roasting, the turkey should be breat-side up. Tuck the tips of the wings under the turkey so that the tips touch; this prevents them from burning to a crisp. If the neck of the turkey is "open," pull the flap of skin up torward the breast and fasten it with a skewer. The drumsticks should be tied together at the "ankles" so that they keep tight to the body. If you can't picture what I'm talking about, go ahead and have a look at this great Youtube video: How to prepare a turkey.

Typical instructions tell you to baste the bird about once every 30 minutes. This is done with an (aptly-named) turkey baster, a sort of big syringe with a rubber ball at the end that is ripe for sexual innuendo. But I'm telling you, basting is evil. It can actually contribute to a drier turkey (even though the goal of basting is to keep the turkey moist) because you're letting the heat escape from the over every 30 minutes and increasing the cooking time. Since I was using a convection oven, the turkey was done after only 2 hours. In fact, the thermometer claimed it was done after 1 hour, but I wasn't buying it; the juice was still all pink and the thighs didn't come easily away from the body. After two hours the juices were clear, the drumsticks loose, and the skin nice and brown. After eating this turkey, I'm going to declare that convection ovens are teh win (and that basting is not); it was the juiciest and tastiest turkey I've ever eaten.

If using a regular oven, you're going to need more like 3 to 3 1/2 hours, and you'll want to cover the turkey with a foil tent until the last half hour or so so that the skin doesn't get too crispy.

After taking the turkey out of the oven, let it sit for 20 minutes or so so that it will be easy to carve. How to carve a turkey probably isn't totally obvious if you haven't done it before, but here's another Youtube video for ya: How to carve a turkey.

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So, my turkey was in the oven, and I had an hour left before folks started coming. I had put the turkey neck in boiling water so I could get a little bit of flavor for the gravy I would make later; I threw away the rest of the giblets because, I'm sorry, I don't have the stomach to cook and eat hearts and lungs. Eeeeeew! So now everything was cooking, there wasn't much more I could do, and it was time for a shower. It felt like it was time for a nap, too, but no rest for the wicked.

When there was a about a half hour left before people started coming, we rearranged the furniture as necessary, set the table, and set out the appetizer and wine. When everyone had arrived -- 10 adults male guests and, including me, 2 adult females -- we explained that we were going to stick religiously to tradition. This meant the men would sit in the living room watching football and drinking beer (the former provided on DVD by Harald, who had recorded Navy-Notre Dame for us; the latter provided by the men themselves, because you can't beat the BYOB out of a Swede's system) and the women would be in the kitchen cooking until the food was done. No one had much of a problem with this, least of all me, because the idea was to give me time to finish the food (since my friends are never on time, I purposely planned for the main course to be done an hour after their intended arrival) with the guys out of my hair and Emma and I sitting and chatting in the kitchen. It also made it work to serve an appetizer while I was actually still cooking.

At 6:30 I took the turkey out of the oven and commenced running around like a maniac. The turkey was put on the table, and the 4 side-dishes -- the stuffing and mashed potatoes with tin foil still on and the green beans and sweet potatoes with foil removed -- were popped into the oven, where I also raised the temp from 325 to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).

During the 30 minutes while the turkey was resting and the side dishes were heating, I:

• Cooked the gravy (see below)
  
• Arranged all the cold bits on the food table (in the kitchen), including the cranberry and apple sauces and the bread
  
• Mixed the Boston Iced Tea (see below) and brought it out to the dining room
  
• Cut up big marshmallows to put on the sweet potatoes
  
• Called Fredrik in to carve the turkey (as said, slavish adherence to gender-based tradition!) while I poured the gravy into its bowl
  
• Removed the foil from the stuffing and mashed potatoes, arranged the marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes, and let it all cook for 10 more minutes
  

It worked out really nicely, actually! When everything was done and arranged, I went out to the living room and told the beer drinkers (who were making a good effort of shouting at appropriate points in the football game while also trying to put their heads together to figure out the basic rules, bless them) that it was time to eat. When I added that "I know no one ever wants to be the first to the buffet table, so..." where Boffe helpfully interrupted me and offered to break that particular ice. :)

So, aside from pretty dense un-risen buns and red wine that was far too cold because I forgot to take it out of the fridge before the food was done, it was all awesome! Super tasty, well received, and I'm proud to say there weren't that many leftovers.

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Giblet Gravy

Turkey giblets
4 cups water (1 l water)
2 T butter (2 msk smör)
2 T flour (2 msk mjöl)
1 chicken bullion cube (1/2 tärning hönsbuljong)
1 cup milk (2,4 dl mjölk)
Chopped fresh parsley

When you put the turkey in the oven, put the giblets (minus the liver if there is one; the flavor is too strong) in a pot with the water and simmer gently while the turkey is cooking.

Once the turkey is done, melt the butter in another pot and whisk in the flour until well blended. Add 1 cup (2,4 dl) of liquid from the boiled giblets and the bullion. Bring to a boil; simmer for a couple minutes. Add the milk and heat just until warm; garnish with a bit of chopped fresh parsley for color.

Some people might complain that I haven't chopped up the giblets into the gravy or used pan drippings from the turkey, but I just didn't see how that was going to fit into my perfectly planned last 30 minutes there. Plus, this gravy turned out super tasty.

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Boston Iced Tea

This drink is not something that is "traditional Thanksgiving" fare. In fact, it's a drink on the menu at Red Lobster, a chain of seafood restaurants in the states. In case they're mad at me for stealing and spreading their super complicated recipe, I'll put in a plug here for how truly awesome Red Lobster is and how their crab alfredo is to die for.

This recipe will make 1 1/2 quarts/liters, but for the dinner I made 6 liters. It was a nice alternative to the wine for Emma and I, and the boys found it mixed well with vodka...

2 cups water (1/2 l vatten)
4 bags of plain black tea, like Lipton Yellow Label (4 tepåsar, vanlig svartte)
2 cups cranberry juice (1/2 l tranbärsjuice)
2 cups ice (1/2 l is)
1 orange, sliced (2 apelsiner, skivade)

Bring water to a boil in a large pot; remove from heat. Let tea bags steep in the water for 10 minutes, then remove them and discard them. Let the tea cool off gradually and then pop it in the fridge to chill.

Mix the tea, cranberry juice, and ice and add orange slices.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving, pt. 4

It's a good thing I divided up all the cooking and did as much as I could ahead of time, because I think I spent at least 6 hours in the kitchen on Friday before the guests arrived (and quite some time even after).

I started by preparing the iced tea that would later go into the Boston Iced Tea. I boiled 2 liters of water, let 15 bags of plain black tea (Lipton Yellow Label) steep in the hot water for 10 minutes, and then removed the bag and left the tea to cool while I went to the store to pick up a couple things that were missing. Then I proceeded to make up the 4 side dishes that would go into the oven after the turkey. Making them ahead of time and in casserole form seemed crucial to being able to get everything ready all at the same time. This also required a trip to IKEA last Saturday where I carefully measured one of their oven forms to make sure they were big enough to hold these side dishes but small enough to fit 4 at a time in my oven. This is serious business!

The four side dishes are such classics that they sort of require no recipe in the sense that everyone has their own for them. So the following recipes are mine, but I obviously win no originality prizes for most of them. They are as follows:

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Bread Stuffing
Stuffing is my absolute favorite. There are so many different kinds, some with fruits and vegetables and others with sausages and giblets, but the regular bread stuffing is the kind I go for and the sage is the most important ingredient. Contrary to the name, though, I don't stuff it; stuffing the bird is a bacteria hazard (or, if you cook the turkey long enough for the stuffing to get hot enough to kill the bacteria, you've overcooked and dried out your bird), plus the stuffing get so very fatty and soggy, so I keep it on the outside.

1/2 cup butter (100 g smör)
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped (2 finhackade vitlöksklyftor)
4 celery stalks, chopped (4 hackade seleristjälkar)
1 onion, chopped (1 hackad lök)
1 loaf white bread, cut into small cubes (1 limpa mjuk vit rostbröd, i små kuber)
2 t chopped sage (1 1/2 tsk hackad salvia)
1 t chopped thyme (1 tsk hackad timjan)
1 t chopped rosemary (1 tsk hackad rosmarin)
2 t chopped parsley (1 tsk hackad persilja)
1 t salt (1 tsk salt)
1/4 t peppar (1/4 tsk svartpeppar)
1 cup chicken broth (2 1/2 dl hönsbuljong)

Melt butter in a large pot. Cook garlic, onion and celery for a couple a minutes; they should still be crunchy. Remove from heat. Add all other ingredients except chicken broth and stir until well mixed. Add chicken a bit at a time and mix until the stuffing is not dry but not too wet; you want the stuffing to sort of "stick together" but not be soggy.

The stuffing can be eaten right away at this point, but I poured it into a casserole dish (the ones I used were IKEA's Koncis 26x20 cm, which hold a bit more than 2 liters and 4 of which can fit perfectly into a typical built-in oven) and, after it had cooled, covered it with tin foil. Instructions on how to handle all 4 side dishes once they've been popped in the oven comes later.

Garlic Cheddar Mashed Potatoes
This is a recipe I started making after coming to Sweden, so a key ingredient is a type of cheddar-flavored cream cheese spread that I can't be sure has an equivalent in the states. However, I'm sure there's something that would make an excellent substitute and probably be even more cheddary.

4 pounds mashing potatoes (2 kg mjölig potatis)
8 garlic cloves, peeled but not chopped
1 cup milk (2 1/2 dl mjölk)
6 oz. cheddar cheese spread (1 paket Creme Bonjour med cheddar smak)
1/2 cup butter (100 g smör)
1/2 t salt (1/2 tsk salt)
1/4 t white peppar (1/4 tsk vitpeppar)

Peel and boil the potatoes along with the garlic cloves (about 25 minutes). After draining them well, mash them up. Make sure you have a really big bowl so it'll be easy to stir. Add the other ingredients and stir until smooth.

Again, this would be the end of the recipe if you were just making it for a normal dinner (although you'd probably make half as much or less), but for me it was into the casserole dish, and after it cooled, on with the tin foil and into the fridge. This one had to be heaped a bit to fit in the dish, but that was no problem.

Green Bean Casserole
I can only guess that a recipe for this dish was on the back of some Durkee French Fried Onion can like 60 years ago, and it's been a favorite of American housewives ever since. It's just one of those brand-name things. Durkee onions are puffier and softer than the Swedish "rostade lök" that are normally used as a hot dog condiment here, and canned green beans don't seem to come in the "French cut" variety here, but I find the dish tastes and feels just the same after preparation.

3 cans green beans, drained (3 burkar haricots verts, avrunna)
2 cans Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup (2 burkar Campbells champinjonsoppa)
3/4 cup milk (2 dl mjölk)
1 cup Durkee French Fried Onions (2 1/2 dl rostade lök)

Just mix everything together and pour it into a casserole dish. Normally you would want to bake this -- about 25-30 minutes at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). I poured it into the casserole dish, on with the foil, into the fridge.

Sweet Potato Casserole
This is another one that seems like such a mysterios mix that everyone wonders about its origins and I suspect it was on the back of some marshmallow package somewhere. Mini marshmallows are much easier to deal with, but I could only find big ones so I had to do a little cutting and arranging. I suppose something spiffy could be done with marshmallow fluff (oddly, easily found in a lot of Swedish stores, usually near the peanut butter and Nutella), but I didn't want to experiment just this time.

3 lb sweet potatoes (1 1/2 kg sötpotatis)
1/2 cup milk (1,2 dl mjölk)
2 T butter (2 msk smör)
1/4 cup brown sugar or molasses (1/2 dl muscvado socker eller mörk sirap)
1/2 t salt (1/2 tsk salt)
1/8 t pepper (1 krm svartpeppar)
Mini-marshmallows

Peel sweet potatoes and cut them into pieces (about as big as normal boiling potatoes). Boil for
15-20 minutes or until soft. Mash until no lumps remain, and then stir in remaining ingredients except marshmallows. Pour potatoes into a casserole dish. Normally you'd want to bake this for 25-30 minutes at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C), the last 10 minutes of which you throw on the marshmallows (enough to make one layer over the top; cut up big marshmallows and arrange on top if you can't find minis). The marshmallows should puff up and become a bit brown. But again, I poured the potatoes into my casserole dish and popped them into the fridge with foil on top.

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All of these recipes are about the right size to serve 12 people at a buffet-style dinner. If you want to make them as a main side dish for 4 people, you'll want to cut the recipe in half.

I started preparing these dishes at about 10am and was finished and ready to take a break at 2pm. And I mean very ready for a break.

Thanksgiving, pt. 3: oops!

Well, I figured at least one of the dishes I planned would be a partial or total wash! The subtitle today is "oops, I killed the yeast."

I seem to have been mostly successful in my attempt to make Sweet Country Corn Bread. Since it's really not a tough thing to make, you might wonder how I was mostly successful. Well, first, my mind must have been wandering somewhere when I was cracking the eggs. I was making a double batch, so I needed two, but I stopped myself right as I was about to crack the fourth into the batter. Oh well, I figured, it certainly won't hurt, and will help test my theory that it might be small eggs that make the cooking times longer when making American recipes in Sweden.

This SEEMED to be the case when, after only 20 minutes, I stuck a knife in the center of the corn bread and it came out totally clean. Cool! So I took the pan out and set it on a wire rack to cool.

After it had cooled down for 10-15 minutes or so, I tried to loosen it and flip it out of the pan. What happened when I did this was that a rather large but thin patch stuck to the bottom of the pan, and I saw that the corn bread was really quite wet and mushy inside, but not in the middle; more off to one side like.

I didn't know what else to do but to re-heat the oven and throw the bread back in for the full cooking time and hope for the best. After cooking it for 25 more minutes, it seemed non-liquidy on both the left and the right sides, but we'll have to see how it tastes. I haven't tried it because I wanted to leave the crust intact.

So, by the way, as far as recipe tips go: corn meal can be purchased at most stores here; look for it in the health food section (you know, where you find nuts and lentils and rice and soy flour) under the name "polenta".

Well, if I mostly salvaged the corn bread, I only semi-salvaged the herb dinner rolls. For this I used a dinner roll recipe in a (gasp!) hard-copy cook book, so I can't really give you anything to go off of. You've got something like this, of course: Bread Machine Dinner Rolls, but I didn't use a bread machine. The idea was to make a regular dinner roll recipe, but to add some herbs to the warm liquid. I chose 2 teaspoons of caraway seeds and some dried parsley for color. Well, they turned out hard and doughy, and I still haven't decided if I'm too ashamed to serve them or not, but at least I'm pretty sure I know what I did wrong. The liquid (in the case of my recipe, milk) was supposed to be heated up in a suacepan along with sugar, butter and salt until the butter melted, and then added to the flour and yeast mixture. But I'm pretty sure you have to cool it down some first, because after melting the butter you certainly don't have liquid that is only 120-130 degrees Fahrenheit. In other words, my liquid was too hot, and I probably killed the yeast. The dough barely rose at all during either the first or second risings, and after double the suggested baking time my buns were still dense and doughy in the middle. The yeast was, I'm also prepared to admit, god know how old and from an opened package.

Sigh. I'm not fabulous with yeast breads.

Anyway, I guess I can serve them anyway and claim that that's exactly the way we yanks like our bread -- no one will know the wiser! Moohaha!

Also on Thursday evening, I pre-cooked the wild rice that will be in the appetizer salad. This frees up a pot and some stove space for Friday and allows the rice to dry off and cool down nicely before going into the salad.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a million potatoes to peel.

Thanksgiving, pt. 2

Since I'm experiencing yet another night of insomnia, I figured I might as well post part 2.

Wednesday night it was time to make the pies. I picked two custardy types, pumpking and pecan, not only because they're the most traditional and "exotic" by Swedish standards but also because they probably only get better after a couple days in the fridge, whereas fruit pies sort of scream to be served warm.

Almost all my attempts to bake with American recipes result in a cake or bread or whatever it is that is still liquidy in the middle after the suggested baking time. I thought this could be because the flour here isn't quite the same (different amounts of protein), but it occurs even in recipes with very little flour, so I'm really at a loss as to why it happens. It's not my oven, by the way, because I had the same problem in our apartment. A few years ago, my attempts at making a pumpkin pie according to my grandmother's recipe resulted in a pie that still hadn't solidified after 3 times the suggested baking time. So experimenting with different recipes was a must. The BettyCrocker.com recipe for Pumpkin-Cream Cheese Pie worked out super for me, so I'm sticking to it.

It seems to have worked out once again -- though, of course, I can't say for sure until I taste it tomorrow night! I actually make a graham cracker crust instead of the shortbread -- use graham crackers (digestivekex) instead of the shortbread and 3 T of sugar instead of flour, and bake for about 10 minutes. Plus, I make the pie in a spring-form pan with the crust only on the bottom, which works out just fine. American-style pie plates are not common items here. I had to leave the pie in the oven for 50 minutes before the center was set, so there's still something mystical in the air, but it seems to have turned out just fine.

I made the pecan pie according this this other BettyCrocker.com recipe, Maple Pecan Pie, though I didn't add the chocolate drizzle to the top. Shortening is not a product readily available in Sweden, but butter works just as well. The maple extract or maple flavoring also isn't something I think you could find. Maple syrup is really quite expensive -- 79 kronor is what I paid for a bottle that contained 2 dl, and this recipe calls for 2.5 dl. But regular syrup can be used as well -- in fact, then you'd just have a regular pecan pie. You'll want to cover the edges with tin foil until the last 15 minutes or so so that the crust doesn't get burned. Again, I had to bake this one longer than suggested -- 60 minutes -- before the middle was no longer liquidy. It seems nice and solid now. The risk of cooking this one for two long is that the pecan top gets sort of black and charred.

Since one of my guests has a severe allergy to tree nuts, I was careful about not touching the pecans with too many things and washing up all the utensils afterwards before doing anything else with them. Luckily though for my wild rice salad, she can eat almonds.

Thanksgiving, pt. 1

On Friday night, we're having friends over for a Thanksgiving dinner. This appeals both to my love of cooking and my love of obsessive planning and list-making.

It's also a pretty fun challenge to make American recipes in Sweden, although in the case of Thanksgiving food, fairly impossible if you haven't planned way ahead and either had your mom send you bottles of vanilla and maple extract or carted back a few cans of pumpkin and packages of wild rice on a return flight.

In the couple years since I last did this, the availability of certain items in Sweden has improved -- wild rice seems readily available at ICA (though it doesn't quite look the same as native Minnesota wild rice) and pumpkins are usually easy to find in October (though my previous attempts to cook and mash pumpkin for pie purposes have ended in watery disaster). Other things are a bit tougher to find, given that Gray's American Foods in Stockholm seems to be in a strange state of flux, maple syrup seems to be less common than before, and the stores that used to have American foods shelves seem to have replaced them with middle-eastern foods (only fair of course). But this is why a good little yankee girl has backups.

The first steps in the mission were of course making a menu and, as I mentioned before, finding a turkey. The turkey, by the way, is on the list of things that now seem more easily available. All three stores where I buy groceries -- ICA Maxi in Tornby, Coop Konsum in Lambohov, and Hemköp in Ryd all had a good supply. They ranged between 3.5 and 5 kg, though I had to look at all three stores before finding the 5 kg bird at Coop. This was also the first thing that needed to be bought, since it needed to thaw out.

So it takes about a week to at least do a half-assed job of this thing. It started on Saturday with me inviting the guests. This is not easy, as we don't have the kind of dining room that allows for huge dinner parties where cats, dogs and babies are involved. This did not, however, stop me from inviting dogs and babies (and about 5 more people than we have butt space for). It's too bad Thanksgiving isn't in the summer, so that yard space could be utilized. I envy my friend Pat, who lives in the desert and surely has nice warm weather around this time so that he's not cooped up in a small space with 12 people on Thanksgiving. Then again, I hear his family deep-fries their turkey, and that's just so many levels of sick.

On Monday I had the menu worked out, and a shopping list. Since I only had a 5 kg bird and suddenly 15 invitees, that list included a couple pounds of extra turkey breast, as that seemed like a smarter solution than buying two turkeys. (In case you're wondering, the traditional guideline is 1 lb = 450 g of turkey per person; if that sounds like a lot, remember that we've got bone and carcass involved here.)

At the risk of this coming back to bite me in the ass (for instance, if I for some reason end up failing on one or two of these dishes), the menu I settled on is as follows:

Menu

Appetizer/mingle/keep people busy while I'm cooking:

• Wild rice and dried cranberry salad
  
• White wine (a dry fruity wine that's just called California White that happens to come in a cardboard carton -- classy! Only the best from my homeland!)
  
• Mineral water for the ladies (I say this because we're all pregnant or nursing; go figure!)
  

Main dish/buffet/hope they realize dessert is coming later:

• Herb-rubbed roasted turkey
  
• Sage bread (non-stuffed) stuffing
  
• Garlic cheddar mashed potatoes
  
• Green bean hotdish (that's casserole to you non-Minnesotans)
  
• That candied sweet potato thing with the marshmallows that everyone's grandmother makes but that apparently doesn't have a name
  
• Sweet country corn bread
  
• Herb dinner rolls
  
• Creamy turkey gravy
  
• Cranberry-orange sauce
  
• Applesauce
  
• California Red, a "soft and berry-y" red wine, also in a classy TetraPak
  
• For aforementioned fertile ladies, Boston Iced Tea
  

Dessert/Yes, dammit, I do expect you to eat more

• Pumpkin cream cheese pie
  
• Maple pecan pie
  
• Coffee and Good Earth Original Tea

This menu ended up containing only one comprimise. I would have rather liked to have mulled apple cider with dessert. This is, however, not something that I've found a way to get my hands on in Sweden. "Cider" here means a kind of booze, of course, and not an all-natural tart apple juice as it does back home. Unlike canned pumpkin or vanilla extract, apple cider is not exactly an item easily smuggled back in a suitcase and stored for several months. Given that we have our own juicer, I certainly could have made my own by combining some, oh, I'd guess Granny Smiths and Royal Galas, but I've never done this before and this amount of work seemed like the bit that would send me over the edge. I decided therefore to instead save the apple cider for some sort of future American Christmas Tea, where I envision serving eggnog and cider along with... with... uh. Okay, we seem to be short on traditional Christmas coffee and cakes type things. Any suggestions as to what our equivalent to lussekatter and pepparkakor is would be greatly appreciated. Anyway, as an alternative to coffee, Good Earth Tea fits very well. I am so in love with this tea (which comes from my favorite restaurant back home, but is also sold in stores like Cub and Rainbow and such, plug plug plug!) that I never come back from the states without a couple packages and you know I like my friends a lot if I'm using it on them. It's sort of like... cinnamon citrus sex in a bag. Just add hot water.

Anyway, that's step one, the menu, which along with a long grocery list was done Monday.

Tuesday brought the shopping (I'm willing to divulge that the total was close to 2000 kronor, not including the stuff that's been imported from the U.S.), the moving of the bird from the freezer to the fridge, and the start of the cooking.

Cranberry-Orange Sauce

I'll share the recipes with you in the order in which I'm making them. Tuesday night I made the cranberry sauce, as it needs time to solidfy and I've had the experience of failing and making a very watery cranberry sauce before. Not this time, though; it looks and tastes great! The recipe I used was from Betty Crocker, as are most of these -- for you Swedes, think of Betty Crocker as Den Rutiga Kokboken and Findus all rolled into one. Anyway, here's the link: Cranberry-orange sauce. I'm sure it would be copyright infringement if I posted the full recipe here or translated it, but I can't imagine it's bad for me to link it and give tips or say what I changed. In this case I used frozen cranberries, as I was unable to find fresh ones (add that to the less-available-than-2-years-ago list). Where it says in the recipe to boil until the cranberries "pop," it gives a much more violent impression of the process than what actually happens... after 10 minutes of boiling I had to sort of squish the cranberries myself in order to get them to open up so the pectin would get out. This is probably what made the difference between a watery cranberry sauce last time I attempted it and a good solid one this time.

Another super-traditional recipe for cranberry sauce can be found here. You can add some grated orange peel to it to give it a citrusy taste.

For those of you who have never eaten it before, cranberry sauce should be about the same look and consistency as lingonberry jam (lingonsylt). Like lingonsylt, we use cranberry sauce as a condiment for meats, almost exclusively for turkey on Thanksgiving (I have personally never seen it in any other context). Lingonsylt is a perfectly acceptable substitute for cranberry sauce, and the difference in taste is quite small -- cranberries are more bitter.

Now I have to run downstairs and make some pies. If any of my guests are reading this, and have also heard that I've been home sick from work, I want you to know that I'm washing my hands scrupulously and, though I'm heavily medicated, I am doing my best to keep strange objects and substances out of the food.

Raining Cats and Dogs

There are some people who shouldn't own a dog or a cat because their lifestyles don't really mesh with what is required to take care of an animal, perhaps especially apartment-dwellers who buy big hunting dogs or folks who get their animals' voice boxes clipped so they don't have to put up with (or train away) barking. The people who left their animals on the steps at the Humane Society where I volunteered as a teenager with reasons like "I'm allergic" (you didn't know you were allergic before adopting this cat... three years ago?) or "doesn't get along with new kitten/new girlfriend/new sofa" (which at least is just the honest version of "I'm allergic") are pretty low on my totem pole as well.

Then there are people who really shouldn't own an animal. As in, I hope there is a register somewhere in which their names can be jotted down and then sent out to all kinds of pet adoption black lists. One of those people is this Swedish hunter who dragged his dog to death behind his car.

For those of you who don't read Swedish, here's the short translation: when the group of hunters were done bagging and tagging for the day, one guy forgot that he'd tied his dog to his trailer hitch and just drove away, dragging the dog 20 km. A witness saw him drive by and tried to stop him, but by the time the guy figured it out the dog had, of course, passed on. The police are hoping the man has conscience enough to turn himself in for the crime of animal cruelty, and they urge people to tie dogs to trees or a stake in the ground rather than a car -- apparently this type of accident isn't totally unheard of in the case of hunters and their dogs.

So, I'm sure this incident wasn't malicious or pre-meditated. It was certainly a mistake. But a mistake that is so unforgiveable that it's both criminal and a more than good reason for this person to never own a dog again. If I have a brain fart serious enough to cause my son or daughter to suffer unimaginable torture and then die, then I'd certainly expect to be rejected if I asked to adopt a new kid.

Then there are people who not only should never own an animal, but would have a special place in hell if I were its architect. Included in this group is a guy named Charles C. Benoit and his grilling buddies. I remember reading this story when I was in grad school. It is definitely in my top 5 "What the hell is wrong with people!" mental scrapbook.

Aside from the hunting dog, another new entry was added to that scrapbook yesterday. Here you have video proof that there are far too many people in the world who are a waste of oxygen.



The veterinarian in the video wonders, if a group of teenagers can kick around a tiny little kitten until one of his legs is almost ripped off, then how do these young men treat other people? While I wonder that as well, I also actually think that it takes a lot more gooey, poisonous ooze in one's soul to treat an animal this way than it does to be cruel to another human being. Some level of dislike for other people is something we can all understand, even if it doesn't lead most of us to act out violently. But the part where someone thinks it's fun to kick a little kitten around like a football, that I cannot fathom.

Fredrik and I reacted differently to these two stories, which both showed up in the news yesterday. By that I don't mean that he wasn't upset; I knew he would think it was just as horrid as I did. I sent him links to the stories over chat. He saw the URL of the video ("cat.used.as.football"...) and watched 3 seconds before replying to me in all caps to never, ever send him something like that again. I, on the other hand, have watched the video at least 10 times. I guess it's a sick form of catharsis; if there are morons in the world that can do this to an animal, then I'd rather ruthlessly confront myself with that fact. This blog is, after all, the Pessimist's Cookbook, not the Sheltered Happy Girl Chronicles. It makes me feel a little more human to poke the evoked sore spot inside me with a sharp stick and confirm that it hurts (how's that for arguing that pessimism brings about self-actualization?). And, of course, the video didn't show me the actual violence or the image of Polly's little body lying broken and bloody on the ground; rather, it was a video of an adorable little furball who was purring away like crazy and stumbling around just like any other kitten, even if he was doing so with only three legs to stand on.

I hope Polly ends up in a good home where someone can feed him lots of tuna and snuggle him 20 times a day. I also hope that cats don't have nightmares and vivid memories of nasty things. I hope all of you that have 4-legged-type-creatures at home give them an extra hug today, because that will just make me feel better.

Thanksgiving Dinner

For the first time in a couple or more years, I'm planning a Thanksgiving dinner. It's tough to decide who to invite, since it's obviously* not a family occassion here and therefore I invite friends, but I can't invite everyone that I'd like to, especially since turkeys here are really on the small side (as is my oven).

So now that I've decided to do it and have invited some people, I started the planning by trying to find a turkey. ICA Maxi had a whole freezer full of 'em, but they we all around or below 4 kg (9 lb). Just now I found a full 5 kg bird at Coop Konsum in Lambohov, but we had walked there to buy milk and weren't really in the mood for walking back home with an 11 lb frozen boulder.

But just for those of you in the states who might be planning your own turkey fest, a comparison:

Price for a whole frozen turkey in America: about 79 cents a pound, or about $9.50 for a 12 lb turkey.

Price for a whole frozen turkey in Sweden: 63 Swedish kronor per kilo, or about $44 for a 12 lb turkey. Youch.

Sweden is many things, but not the place to go for a cheap turkey.

*This was apparently not so obvious to some of my mom's friends. They seemed surprised that Thanksgiving wasn't celebrated in Sweden. The entire combined force of America's past and present second grade teachers sighed/cried/rolled in their graves.

Dumb Things Swedes Think about Americans: Part 1 of Many

The word "dumb" in the title of this post could easily be replaced by "hypocritical" and I'd still have enough for a many-parts series.

I'll start off with a superficial, easily explained one.

Swedes can often be heard to say that Americans are insincere. This is one of many conversations that start with "I was an au pair in the U.S. for a year and I noticed that EVERYONE..." or something similar. They reference the fact that service personel are overly nice, for instance saying "Have a nice day" when you leave Wal-Mart or some such. They mention the fact that, when we greet someone, we usually ask "How are you?" but, they complain, we're not genuinely interested in the answer.

I'll skip over the inside-the-box cultural bias that seems to lead them to believe all courtesy must be insincere. Just because it's a commodity severely lacking among service people (or people in general?) in this country doesn't make it insincere when found elsewhere.

Rather, I'll just let the whole argument be made by this "How are you?" business. This particular falacy is brought up in a commercial that's been playing on TV lately. It's for a telecommunications company that has a series of commercials in which they give tips for doing business in other countries. The tips are tongue-in-cheek, of course, but still based on what Swedes think is reality. They mock the Swedish man doing business in America by showing an America asking him "How are you?" and showing the Swede answering "Well, not so great, actually; I had a fight with my wife this morning."

Now, I'm a certified English teacher. I have learned both Swedish and French in a classroom. And I'm certain that I was assured in every language-type classroom setting that -- at the very least in Britain, France and Sweden -- you're never supposed to respond to a typical greeting asking you how you are by actually telling the person how you are.

If you're not convinced, my Nordic friends, imagine someone telling you about the sudden itchy rash they've developed on their anus when you ask them "Hur är läget?"

Et tu, CNN?

Okay, go to CNN's results tracking site for the House elections: http://us.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/main.results/#val=H.

Now click on Minnesota.

Now marvel at the fact that Minneapolis and St. Paul seem to have switched places (and thereby congressional districts), and that Minneapolis has suddenly become the state capitol.

Losing it, Fox Style

Okay, so I seem to only be popping in to write about politics these days. There are only 7 days left until the election; deal with it.

I just watched a video that Fredrik linked me; it's a clip from Fox News of anchor Megyn Kelly losing any shred of maturity in the face of a very calm Bill Burton, Obama adviser. The topic of discussion was the claim that Obama is a "socialist" that wants to redistribute wealth, and whether or not this is a fake controversy being drummed up by Fox News. (Check it out here.) Her nonsense during this interview (in which, like so many Fox interviews, she talked and expected her interviewee to listen) included many crimes against sound statistics, but there's one in particular that I'd like to focus on.

"I get e-mails from Republicans, Democrats and independents alike who are concerned about that notion; who understand that right now in this country, the top 25% already pay 67% of the income taxes and they're worried about shifting that balance even more."

It's not kind to take advantage of the fact that most people suck at math. But in her defense, I bet she genuinely sucks at it, too.

Let's do a little experiment.

Let's say we have 4 people in America. One earns $10,000 a year, one earns $25,000 a year, one earns $50,000 a year, and the last guy earns $200,000 a year. Now let's also say that we don't even have a progressive tax system, but rather, that pipe dream of all libertarians and reactionaries everywhere: a 15% flat tax.

With a 15% flat tax, we collect a total of $42,750 in income tax from our four participants. The guy who makes $200,000 is our top 25%, and his share of the income tax is $30,000. This is over 70% of the total income tax that we have collected.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, our tax system is really really seriously and, like, totally unfair!

No, of course it's not; he pays more taxes simply by virtue of the twin facts that he makes more than 70% of the income and that this isn't feudal Europe. And this despite the fact that the example uses a flat tax, a system that very few actually advocate as the absolute most fair. Most people believe in a progressive tax system in which a higher percentage is paid by people who earn more (bloody socialist pigs, all of us).

The income distribution in my example is pretty modest compared to the extremes that exist in the U.S. An income of $10,000 is about what a person makes if they work full time at minimum wage, and an income of $200,000 is, I dare say, not an exaggerated representation of the actual average for the top 25% of income-earners.

Of course, not surprisingly, her statistic isn't correct to begin with anyway. According to the IRS, in 2006 the top-earning 25% of taxpayers earned 67.5% of the nation's income. Note -- not that they paid 67% of the income tax, but that they earned 67.5% of all the income. In light of this fact, do you suppose people would react the same way to hearing that they pay 67% of the income tax? Of course not. It would be sort of a "duh" moment (well, for most people; some people really suck at math). But what if I now tell you that the top 25% actually pay 86% of all the income tax? When tempered with the information that they also earn 67% of all the income, I still contend that many people would take a moment to reflect and decide that this isn't so bad (and some would still have the presence of mind to let out a good, loud "duh.").

And again, that's most people. The kind that actually can make a logical and consistent connection between what they believe, what they think they believe, and an actual real-life situation. Okay, so maybe that's not so many people. But that's okay; there are smart people with calculators who can help the rest of them out.

100% Genuine Fake American

Clearly I wasn't the only one who had started to wonder about her Real American (tm) status. After watching the October 20 episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (which I did this morning, as they are played one week late and in the middle of the night here), I could firmly and decisively say that I'm definitely a Fake American.

Go ahead and test yourself, so you can know once and for all: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, full episode from October 20, 2008.

But seriously folks. The "If you're not with us, you're against us" brand of dividing us into two camps and making us feel dirty for not belonging to one of them, that might have worked nauseatingly well for Mr. Uniter-not-divider, but in pushing her half-assed brand of kiddie clubhouse wars, Palin seems to have missed one thing in her calculation: for some odd reason, big cities tend to contain more people than small towns. If you go around implying that 75% of the country are fake Americans, it's going to bite you in the ass. Especially ill-advised is doing so after photo-opping your way around Ground Zero. After McCain-Palin's resounding loss, I hope she finds herself a small island somewhere and secedes from the union (I'd rather prefer that we keep Alaska; how otherwise would we keep an eye on Russia?), where I'm sure she can be empress of her very own Real America.

Main Street or Wall Street?

The ongoing presidential campaign has given me an identity crisis.

There's all this talk about Main Street and Wall Street. About Small Town America and Small Town Values. About Joe the Plumber, gosh, poor guy. So I can no longer avoid asking myself: am I Main Street or Wall Street?

I am most decidedly not from Wall Street. See, that's a street in New York, and I'm from Minnesota.

But, admittedly, I never lived on Main Street, either. I grew up on Gresham Avenue.

Those of us who come from the Twin Cities like to think of it as a booming metropolis. There are about 2 million people there, and I can promise it narrowly trumps Stockholm for crowdedness and corporations and sky-scrapers and whatnot. But then again, by American standards, the Twin Cities is not huge, and people there have a reputation for being nice and polite, don'tcha know. And since the whole state of Minnesota seems to be viewed as a rural farm-boy paradise by both natives and outsiders -- around 75% of the residents live in cities, which is pretty much the national average, but I suppose having any amount of farmland qualifies a state for Hicksville status -- I'm not sure if our buildings are tall enough and our jobs white-collar enough to show that our citizenry is adequately bereft of all moral fiber. Since I'm actually from the suburbs anyway, there's really no saying how the scales may tip for me.

I'm definitely not Joe the Plumber. I'm a computer programmer. Or at least, I'm currently a computer programmer. My career of choice is high school teacher, and I'm just taking a temporary leave from that career. Teaching is by no means a blue-collar job, but it's certainly in a league below/above computer programmer and stock broker as far as Unwashed Peasant/Salt of the Earth status goes. But it's a tough call -- a teacher works too hard performing a vital service to society for too little pay and far too little gratitude, but she's also a person who has filthied her mind for 4 or more years in halls of higher learning. It could really go both ways. And since I have switched jobs, now working a slightly better-paying desk job in the profit-driven private sector, it's very possible that my family values and my sense of What America Is were damaged in the switch.

There is, of course, one niggling little side note. In Sweden, a plumber can easily make more than a computer programmer, and ridiculously more than a teacher. If Joe is going to make over $250,000 a year, then apparently that's also the case in the states as well. Who knew? I mean, when we're all trying to figure out who we are and where we belong and how much people think we ought to pay in taxes, it's rather rude of people to go messing up the accepted hierarchy like that. But I suppose in a sense, what with both Fredrik and I possibly having lay-offs looming on the horizon, struggling to make mortgage payments (on our very modestly sized house, thank you very much) that have gone up dramatically in size because of interest hikes due to the financial crisis, and seeing the savings that we have so scrupulously put aside eaten away at by a bad global economy, it could be said that we're part of the problem, and not the solution, when it comes to inappropriately mingling outside of our so-called class. It seems kind of crazy I guess, but it makes me start to wonder if people in New York and San Francisco are also being hit hard by this financial crisis. In that case, I can understand if I'm not the only one who's confused about which of these two seemingly well-defined camps I might belong to.

One would have thought that the last two presidential elections would have given us a much easier time defining ourselves. I mean, since the universal adoption of the terms Red State and Blue State, a person could simply, when in doubt, look at a map or ask his neighbors. However, when I tried this, I just got more befuddled. Despite the fact that Minnesota hasn't voted for a Republican president for years (hello folks, who voted for Mondale? That's right, only us), they keep calling us a Swing State or a Purple State. I can't argue with CNN and MSNBC and Fox on this point, as I'm sure they know what they're talking about. But it means that, instead of helping me solve my identity crisis, I merely feel a much heavier weight of responsibility on my supposedly election-swaying shoulders. If Sarah Palin would just stop being so coy and just come out and tell us which parts of America are more pro-America than others, then it would make things a lot easier for all of us.

Wait, I just thought of something. I suppose that since the corridors of knowledge that I was tainted by were at St. Olaf College, an expensive private school, then I'm clearly in the... well, but wait, St. Olaf is located in the tiny rural community of Northfield, whose slogan is "Cows, Colleges and Contentment." And hang on, I've also attended the University of Minnesota and was a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. Oh, and of course, I got my teaching degree at Linköpings universitet. Those are all state schools! Well, but... actually, I might also be an over-educated elitist. I do really like arugula, and I've never touched a six-pack.

I suppose -- and it would be really unscrupulous of me not to mention this -- that the death-blow comes in the fact that I'm also a European. I mean, I feel American, but I'm now a Swedish citizen and I've lived here for over 6 years. I mean, it's not France or anything, but I guess I do have to admit that I'm surrounded every day by the fabled Culturally-superior-but-morally-inferior-especially-by-virtue-of-being-culturally-superior.

The verdict seems clear. I'm out of touch. I'm Wall Street. I'm, uh, Big Town and have Big Town values. No, wait, I don't have any values, that's how it probably is. I'm a snobby elitist that is supposed to, by traditional standards, make a ton of money and stomp on the Little Guy (and the fact that I don't is probably just some sort of failure on my part).

I should clearly vote for Barack Obama.

But see, that doesn't feel right. I clearly don't want to be a part of the Big Town. Being part of Small Town America sounds so nice. I want to be respectful and wholesome. I want to be hard-working and patriotic and pro-America. I would like to think that I value common sense and fishing and not locking your door at night and America being awesome. I want to be a Real Person with Real Values (tm). Even though it appears that I'm a fake person with no values, I wouldn't want people to know it.

I guess the best thing to do is to vote for McCain and Palin. I want to vote for them because I want to be a Real American because it sounds good. When it comes right down to it, the Republicans have always had the best track record of watching out for the little guy and sticking it to Wall Street.

Er, wait...