The Pessimist's Cookbook

Moral Priorities

2011-11-13T21:37:00.004+01:00

Our son Benjamin is learning new words at lightning speed, and in two languages no less. He's starting to get to that age where he can form a full enough sentence to make mistatements or out-loud ponderings that can embarrass Mommy and Daddy (i.e., ”wasn't Daddy in the bed!” shouted to the entire supermarket).

Sometimes the thing that slips out of a toddler's mouth and embarrasses Mom and Dad is a swear word, which are of course especially banished in my home country. But anyone who's been within 100 meters of Fredrik and I will know that we don't give a fuck if Benjamin says fuck. In fact, I'm not proud – though not embarrassed – to admit that we might actually have been encouraging it lately. My philosophy is that it's not the words, but the content, that is okay or not. If it's swear words that are bad, does that mean it's more taboo to say ”I'm so fucking tired” than to look a person in the face and say ”You're an ugly idiot”?

I feel we have no reason to actively discourage language we use ourselves – and since our son will never hear us use words, curse- or otherwise, to denegrate a human being, to hurt someone's feeling, to judge a person by anything other than their actions or statements, then we think he's going to turn out alright. This is a household where it's perfectly acceptable to say ”Ow, fuck!” when you stub your toe but not acceptable to say ”She's a fucking bitch.” The choice of vocabulary is completely irrelevant as a measurement of moral quality.

Anyone who's been within 100 meters of me lately also knows that I've fallen in love with Tim Minchin. A carrot-topped Australian piano virtuoso comedian with a Shakespearian vocabulary, a hard-on for rationality, Atheism, and both grammar and math jokes? I'd be hard-pressed to ask for more. His songs have been playing constantly around the Paulsson-Ceangailte household lately, and Benjamin has a favorite. The Pope Song. (The quality of that particular film is not the best, but the performance is as fabulous as ever and I WAS THERE! Ahem. I digress.) The lyrics consist of at least 40% ”fuck” if I'm forced to estimate. The chorus is, to make a long story short, ”fuck the mother-fucking pope.” Benjamin likes to dance to the song and, when it's over, cries ”again, again, more fucka fucka!” Am I now a hypocrite after saying that we don't teach him to use words to slander people? Not at all. Anyone with an ounce of listening comprehension will listen to the song and hear that it has two messages. It's not about mocking religion or a belief in God. The fact that the pope is a religious figure is at most indirectly related to Minchin's rancor. The first message: the pope has protected priests that have molested and raped children. The second message: we are a sad society if we are more offended by the word ”fuck” than the support and adoration of one billion Catholics for a man and an organization that protects child rapists. The song is as much a deceptively potty-mouthed masterpiece of social commentary as South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. ”Horrific, deplorable violence (and war) is okay, as long as people don't say any naughty words!”

DO we live in a world where people can somehow torture up a moral relativity where child rape isn't a big deal? The message this week is, depressingly, yes. The news from Penn State reads like something out of some dark and misanthropic cousin to the Onion.

For those of you who haven't read or heard the news and might still have some hope for humankind, here's the summary: assistant coach Jerry Sandusky of Penn State's football team is being charged with a long string of crimes involving molesting and raping children. The allegations state that he used his workplace – specifically, the showers in the locker room – as the scene of his crimes. Further, that his colleagues, including the head coach Joe Paterno, were aware of his crimes and did jack squat, allowing them to continue.

Now that Sandusky has been arrested, Paterno has been fired because of his role as an accomplice to Sandusky's crimes. Riots have ensued on the campus of Penn State. But sadly, the riots are not in outrage over the fact that their school was a shameful party to years unimaginably heinous acts. They're rioting in outrage over the firing of their beloved head coach, who has ”done so much for the university”.

In Jon Stewart's report over the incident on the Daily Show, we hear that among the allegations is an incident in which a 6'5” man walked into the showers and was an eyewitness to Sandusky raping a child, and that the man did NOTHING. The description of this incident is in no way graphic, but has upset me so much that I'm a bit off-kilter. We had friends visiting last night and the topic of these Penn State riots came up, so Fredrik wanted to show them the Daily Show video, but I told him that I couldn't stomach listening to the description again.

I'm aware of the fact that other voices have come out of Penn State this week, and that the upside is that most people are genuinely outraged over what has happened to child victims. But that the first voices we heard on the subject were from people who had so violently missed the point, and that there were enough of them to constitute RIOTS, leaves a person speechless.

As usual with my blog posts, I have no conclusion, no happy ending, no deep philosophical seed of wisdom to impart. I'm really just getting it off my chest: the idea that people can muster up collective moral outrage over a slight blow to their sports program instead of pondering the hideousness of human nature revealed by this case sickens me. The priority given to sports programs at American universities has always been outrageously inflated compared to the priority given to the universities' actual mission of educating people, but this takes it to tragicomic proportions.

So I will continue to be perfectly fine with Benjamin throwing the word ”fuck” around. I have sense and priorities enough to know that that's much better than him becoming a rapist.

Accent

2011-09-10T12:11:00.003+02:00

I'm proud of the fact that I speak Swedish with almost no noticeable accent. What little imperfections there are in my pronunciation and language only serve to make people wonder if I'm not from 'round here, but without them being able to guess where I am from. Every year when we get new students I ask each class to guess where I'm from. I do this at the end of the first lesson I have with them, so they've had plenty of time to hear me speak. Each class gets 20 guesses. None of them have ever won.

That's why I smile a bit when people say ”I DID hear that you had a bit of an American accent!” Without fail, a person has always said that AFTER finding out that I'm American. Again, forced to come up with it on their own, there are few that venture to ask if I'm foreign, and none that have managed to guess where I'm from. Their confidence that they could hear a characteristic American ”R” really only comes after I'm said where I'm from.

So I was a bit put out this morning when I was at the playground with Bennie and, after I'd exchanged about 3 sentences with her, another mom said ”Are you from the U.S.?”

But I was only crushed for a few seconds before realizing: 1) I'd been walking around the place speaking English with Bennie (or even yelling English AT Bennie) and 2) Bennie was wearing a t-shirt with a stars and stripes monkey on it.

Still, I feel the need to practice some vowels.

Jingoist Jingle

2010-07-20T16:10:00.004+02:00

I have no idea what reminded of this today, but I've felt for a long time that the U.S. ought to change its national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner." A song about bombs and war doesn't seem like the best way to celebrate national spirit or start a baseball game.

I've always preferred the song "America the Beautiful." It was one of the songs we sang along with our teacher's guitar in kindergarten, so I suppose it's got a nostalgic air for me, but it also focuses on things that I think are better to be proud of. Instead of bombs, wheat fields and high mountains. Instead of victory in war, spacious skies and two vast oceans. It's a theme not unlike that of the Swedish national anthem, "Du Gamla Du Fria". Though there are apparently a lot of people who would like to change the Swedish national anthem to Ulf Lundell's "Öppna landskap," the theme is basically the same: focus on Sweden's natural beauty. (Since "Öppna landskap" mentions moonshining, though, I don't know if that change would jive with the officials...)

But whatever it was that reminded me of my distaste for "The Star-Spangled Banner" today, I decided to search Facebook to see if anyone agreed with me. There's always a group for these things, right? I can't say I put a huge amount of effort into finding a group, but nothing came up on the obvious search terms (except groups calling to change the U.K. and Canadian national anthems). I looked at the Wikipedia page for the national anthem and saw nothing mentioning a movement or campaign to get it changed. After a Google search, though, I did find this blog post by Amanda Marcotte. She argues that "America the Beautiful" is just as bombastic (pun intended, certainly) as "The Star-Spangled Banner," but personally I'm not PC enough to think a "hey, we're awesome!" attitude in a national anthem is wrong. She also says that it would be just as difficult to translate into Spanish as the current anthem -- translation into Spanish is the context in which she's brought up the issue -- but besides not agreeing with that (nothing says that the language in the Spanish version of either has to be as advanced as in the original in order to be beautiful), translatability is not necessarily my first priority here.

However, the suggestion that Amanda makes for our new national anthem, "This Land is Your Land," certainly has its appeal. Aside from echoing "America the Beautiful"'s spirit of America having a huge and varied landscape, by mentioning California, New York, the squares of the city, the shadow of the steeple -- I like the fact that it makes America not just a landscape, but a landscape with people in it. The main theme, "This land was made for you and me," a theme of inclusion that reminds us that we all came from other places, is much more worthy of celebration than superiorly bombing your enemy to smithereens. Just like with Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus," there's a risk of feeling sarcastic when singing this song of inclusion and welcoming. But like Amanda mentions in her blog post, the last lines of "This Land is Your Land" are:

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.

As Amanda writes, "Best part is the implied challenge at the end for this country to actually live up to its promise." At any rate, I'd rather sing "America the Beautiful" and feel a bit ashamed about us not quite living up to the spirit of caring for America's landscape, or sing "This Land is Your Land" and feel a bit ashamed about us not quite living up to the spirit of welcoming all types of people in our country, than to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and feel ashamed that my country doesn't even strive towards these priorities and focuses pretty exclusively on "bombs are kewl."

My Name is Lori - Karma Lite

2010-07-07T05:03:00.004+02:00

Tonight I managed to commit an act of charity, and also to lose my bank card.

About 13 years ago I had a summer job at the 3M tape factory. I worked the graveyard shift, 10 pm to 6 am, so my days were naturally turned around. Personally, I thought it was ideal; you get to sleep as late as you want and still have your evenings free. Can't they open a graveyard shift high school that I can work at? I doubt the students would complain...

One weekend morning at about 2 am I was grocery shopping at Cub Foods and was approached by a petite Hispanic girl in a Taco Bell uniform. She probably weighed 50 pounds soaking wet. She'd just finished work and was supposed to be picked up by a family member, but the family member never showed. She wondered if I could give her a ride home. I took a quick look around while the gears were whirring in my head -- what the hell, why are there so many elderly people shopping at Cub at 2 in the blinking morning -- and decided that the quotient of possible danger to logical explanation for why she asked specifically me multiplied by the unlikelihood of someone dressing up in a Taco Bell uniform in order to kidnap me seemed pretty okay. Her house was on my way home anyway, so I told her to hop in.

When we pulled up to her house, she pulled out a Taco Bell-stamped envelope of money (it was apparently payday, and I totally wondered at the time why Taco Bell paid her in cash) and gave me a $5 bill. I most certainly did not want her money and very much wanted to refuse it and explain that I was glad I could help her get home safe, but I've always had a shyness of the "avoid ANY kind of conflict AT ALL COSTS" type (don't worry, I'm mostly over that now), so I thanked her and took the money and went on my way.

And that bugs me to this day. I was actually thinking about it earlier today. I'm excellent at holding a grudge, especially against myself.

Now, 13 years later, I'd just put Benjamin to bed here at my parents' house and headed out to pick up some milk and OJ. I took a drive over to Byerly's, just because the place gives me the super warm fuzzies. When I was putting my groceries in the car, I remembered that I wanted to take out some cash, and while I was looking back at the store to see if they had an ATM, a woman approached me and asked for help.

She wasn't a tiny Hispanic girl, but rather, a kind-sounding middle-aged lady that happened to be missing a few teeth and was on the brink of tears.

Her explanation of what she needed was a bit fuzzy to me, given that she was visibly shaken and speaking quietly, but the gist of it seemed to be: she was visiting someone at St. John's hospital, her wallet was either lost or stolen, she needed to get home to Stillwater, and wondered if I had a few dollars for gas.

I answered, quite honestly, that I didn't have any cash.

Before I had even finished saying so, she excused herself for bothering me and walked away.

This is where I go back into the store to get the cash I needed anyway, and lose my bank card.

See, American cash machines have the unfortunate routine of spitting out your cash and THEN your card. I'd forgotten this and am once again grateful that Swedish cash machines work the other way around. I grabbed my cash from the machine, went over to a cashier to ask her to break up the bill for me, and walked back past the cash machine in time to wonder why it was beeping so loudly. Then I swore pretty loudly and lunged at the machine a split second too late to save my card from being sucked back in and shredded, and was greeted by the message "Your card has been destroyed for security purposes, please contact your financial institution." (And you have to admit that you, too, would have stood there pressing buttons and hoping to magically reverse that process, yes?)

Anyway, whatever.

I went back into the parking lot and saw the dejected lady sitting in a rather vintage-and-not-in-a-good-way vehicle with two equally dejected looking men. The window was down, and as I approached I could see that she was crying. When I asked if she was alright, she tried to brighten herself up and say that she was fine. I asked about who she'd been visiting -- her dad had had a heart attack but he was doing alright now -- and saw that her gas gauge read bone dry. I gave her $5 and said that I hope her dad will be alright. She thanked me and said she was going to sit and compose herself for a while, but as I buckled up and started my car, I saw one of her male companions on his way to the 76 station with a gas can in hand.

I hope 2 gallons of gas was enough to get that clunker home to Stillwater. Perhaps now I will let myself off the hook for not refusing that other girl's money. But mostly, I just think it's funny that I've added to the list of times that my mother thinks I've narrowly escaped a kidnapping attempt outside of a St. Paul grocery store.

Klyftpotatis

2010-07-05T18:00:00.002+02:00

The gap between poor children and rich children is up for discussion again, this time in regards to the grades they get in school: Choice in School Widens the Grade Gap .

I'd like to provide an alternative analysis.

There is indisputably a positive correlation between having well-to-do parents and performing well in school. Therefore, I don't find it inappropriate for me to exchange the concept of well-to-do kids for the concept of talented kids.

We see on the graph that grades for all 4 categories -- what has been labeled high, fairly high, fairly low, and low income kids -- have gone up since 1990.

Parents being given the opportunity to choose an alternative to mediocre public schools has therefore, according to my analysis, not brought down the lower income children. Rather, it has helped put an end to the holding back of children who are more talented at traditional schoolwork. It has even, perhaps, created the desired effect of causing the public schools to get their butts in gear and improve themselves -- thereof the rise in grades for all categories of children.

I do believe that we need to make sure everyone can choose a better school and that income, which is only symptomatically related to success in school (but, once again, undeniably related nonetheless) is a barrier that we should make efforts to break. But there would be little point to having grades if everyone got the same, wouldn't there? If anything, I think the real story in this graph is "what's up with the general grade inflation going on here??" I don't doubt Fjelkner's analysis (she is the head of my teachers' union) about returning the responsibility for schools to the national level -- I have yet to form an opinion on that subject, and frankly think it would be 12 of one, a dozen of the other -- but I appreciate Margareta Pålsson (schools spokesperson for the ruling conservative party) saying that choice in school is critical and what we need to do is make sure that those choices are open to everyone. I'm also pleased to see that even Ylva Johansson (schools spokesperson for the socialist party) sees school choice as a part of Sweden now, and that solutions to both problems and "problems" must be found in other areas.

Either way, I don't see the benefit to Sweden of making sure everyone is equally poorly educated. But, with a bit of deja vu from the earlier article I blogged about on the subject of the growing number of "rich" children, it appears that I'm surrounded by people who feel that everyone getting the same grades is an obvious end unto itself.

Lasse

2010-06-17T16:10:00.003+02:00

I'm sitting here wondering if it's kosher for a teacher to blog about her political views. Mja. Let's say that it is.

Today is the first day of my summer vacation. My school has been open since 2006, so it was our second class of high school graduates that entered real life last Friday. Work wasn't quite over for us teachers though, as we still had our company's yearly conference/meeting to attend. The question was, what was I looking forward to more: seeing my colleagues in party mode or listening to the one speaker on the lecture list that made me drop my jaw, Lars Ohly?

Here comes the obligatory explanation of Swedish politics and whatnot. In Sweden, there are public schools (in the American meaning of the word; school that are financed by and run by the government) and there are "friskolor," which most closely resemble the American concept of "charter schools". They are financed by public funds (they receive a certain amount of money per student that attends the school) and, with a few exceptions, they must follow the same rules as any other school. The important difference is that they are run by a private company, which like all other companies wants to make some kind of a profit.

Lars Ohly is the head of Sweden's Vänsterpartiet -- the "left party". It used to be called "the left party communists," and though they've removed the communist bit from their names, it gives you an idea of where they stand politically. Of the 7 parties that make up Sweden's parliament, Vänster is most strongly opposed to charter schools.

This, and the fact that teachers are known to lean very strongly towards Folkpartiet (the Liberals, on the other side of the political spectrum), meant that I giggled when I saw that Lars Ohly would be speaking at our conference. A conference for Baggium Utbildning AB, operator of 41 charter high schools. Lars Ohly's audience would consist of 700 men and women whose monthly paycheck comes from a system that he thinks should not exist.

Oh, and it's an election year.

Ohly opened his speech by telling us that he believes it's important that there's a school out there for everyone. He worked on a government initiative which had as its goal that 50% of all Swedes would continue on in higher education after high school, but he understands that not everyone -- heck, not even 50%, he says -- should be an academic. There have to be "practical" schools, schools for people who want to be carpenters and plumbers and hairdressers and everything else that society needs but that often gets looked down upon in relation to fancy degrees and university pedigrees. But, he continued, we're making a mistake if we give these more hands-on students an education that is devoid of the theoretical; of math and English and civics and everything other kind of knowledge that may not seem important in a car mechanic's or an assistant nurse's working life but which is important for every individual citizen in their everyday, private lives and for their participation in a democratic society.

This, according to Ohly, is where the current conservative government is going wrong with education. And this, according to me, is about where his audience started to squirm in their seats.

It's not that we didn't agree with him. Well, I suppose I can't speak for the other 699, but I CAN say what our company's vision is: educate the future plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, florists, painters, and all other kinds of hands-on workers of tomorrow, in an apprenticeship-based format where they spend about 50% of their high school hours working at an honest-to-goodness company. "Everything that can be learned on the job should be learned on the job." But we also think it's important that all of our students become well-rounded and prepared for real life, not just working life. Future voters and law abiders need to know civics. Future homeowners and wage earners need to know math. And future members of a rather small European country in a quickly shrinking world need to know English. Our students study the same core subjects as all other high school students and are qualified for university studies when they graduate.

We agree, in other words, with Lars Ohly. Is that what made us uncomfortable? No, rather, it was merely the fact that he talked to us as though we didn't. Or, perhaps, as though WE did, but worked for a company that didn't. Was it the case that he wasn't entirely up to speed about our company, or was it all the OTHER schools he was talking about ("NOT you guys, you guys are good.")?

He continued by talking about how it's important to provide for those who make the wrong choice or who change their minds after choosing a certain program. Students in Sweden are forced to choose a specific educational program when they apply for high school, and that's a rather heavy burden we put on the shoulders of our 15-year olds. But what about those who discover "too late" that they've made the wrong choice? What if they finish high school, start working, and then discover that the job that they've trained for is really not their thing?

Then he came to the meat of the speech, the bit that we were all waiting for. "I can't come and talk to Baggium Utbildning without talking about charter schools." In short, Lars Ohly is sceptical to a profit motive in a system financied with public funds and which has a mission as important as educating our children. It leads to charter schools hiring unqualified teachers, skimping on the teacher-student ratio, and cutting corners wherever possible in terms of materials, school nurses, libraries, and all other forms of things that make an education richer but a school's wallet emptier.

His central critique of our concept -- yes, now he was getting personal -- is that we ought to have our students out at a workplace less often. "It's important not to abdicate responsibility for the student's education. Sometimes it works well, but sometimes it works really poorly."

Of course, I have translated his comments into English and shortened them, but I do not feel that I have paraphrased too brutally or corrupted the tone.

After his speech, Ohly took questions. I was hoping the microphone might come my way before time ran out. I was calculating our teacher-student ratio in my head and thinking about which of my colleagues were qualified. I was trying to piece together what he said at the beginning of his speech with the seemingly conflicting remarks he made at the end. But I didn't have to worry that his comments would go without opposition. I felt that the best comments came from the leaders of the company, perhaps because they took the words out of my mouth. But since this is my blog, I'll let myself get a bit more wordy and put it my way.

Charter schools are not subject to the same laws that require public schools to hire qualified teachers as often as possible. That doesn't mean that we don't. Baggium's goal is prioritize qualified teachers. When a qualified teacher isn't available, we prioritize highly skilled professionals with experience in their fields (that is, experience as plumbers, small business owners, etc.) with the good communication skills it requires to instruct young people and keep up a good relationship with the companies out students are placed at. Our hiring processes are, in other words, the same as at a public school. It's not an easy task finding a person who is both a plumber and has a teaching degree, no matter if the employee is a private or a public institution. In my eyes, a plumber with 30 years of experience and an open and pedagogical attitude is preferable to a person who's never held a wrench (or, for that matter, much better than no teacher at all). In the case of core subjects, 80% of Sweden's working teachers are qualified. At my school, that number is 100%. Perhaps because our school doesn't hire unemployed civil engineers to be math teachers and then work around Sweden's school laws to avoid having to fire them when a slightly more expensive qualified teacher comes along -- a practice not at all unheard of at public schools.

But our core teachers are not "just" qualified. I have a Swedish teaching degree in mathematics and English, but I also have a master's in math, English is my native language, and my education in computer science and art make me a valuable asset at a workplace where students have to be taught to use our intranet, computers often have to be fixed up after our students have used them, a website has to be administrated and a whole mountain of addresses, grades, and schedules has to be databased with pedantic precision. None of these things are necessary in order for me to count as an officially qualified teacher, but they make me a better teacher and a better employee. They are valued by my employer, both figuratively and literally: I command a salary more than 10% above what I would receive at a public school, where my age and number of years of experience would have been plugged into a formula and my "extra" merits would be verbally praised once or twice but otherwise ignored. The story is much the same for my colleagues in our core subject department. Add to the fact that our employer provides salary bonuses after 5 and 8 years of experience or after we've done something "above an beyond" our everyday duties that benefits our students, as well as the fact that they help our unqualified teachers become qualified by providing classes or time off of work for studies, and many of Ohly's criticisms fall flat on their face.

So we clearly don't skimp on our teachers, whether we're talking qualifications or purely in dollars, so what do we skimp on? Surely something has to give if the company is going to make a profit? We don't have the money to buy all the equipment we would need to train a mechanic, a plumber, or a groom. We can't have a state-of-the-art workshop on site or a fully functional stall with 5 horses. But we don't have to. We put our students where those things already exist, where they get to learn by doing instead of just reading, and that gives us more freedom to invest in textbooks, a school library, healthy school lunches instead of re-heated, transported, mass-produced food-like substances. Ohly's main critique of our schools is that our students are too often at a workplace and too seldom at school, but aside from "learning by doing" being the core idea of our company it's also what allows us to have the resources to build a better school and gives our students the ability to discover "hey, this job really isn't for me" long before they graduate. It doesn't mean we abdicate responsibility for our student's education -- a theory that our work subject teachers can disprove by showing how many miles they drive every week to visit and evaluate our students at work.

Pure numbers can say a lot. Ohly mentioned that the teacher-student ratio in Swedish schools has dropped from 9.1 teacher per 100 students to 8.3 to 100 in recent years. At Baggium's schools the average is 10.3 and at my school it's 12. And that's not counting the mentors at our student's work placements. In core subjects, our students are in groups of about 16 -- about half the size of groups at the public schools. In their work subjects, the groups are even smaller. I know the name of every student at my school and have had all but a handful in some subject. Since we tend to get kids who don't think school is fun, this level of attention is incredibly important. So Ohly? We're not skimping.

You can tell that I really believe in what we're doing at my place of work. I don't believe it's a concept that would have developed or survived in the public school system. And after my company has been doing it for 11 years, we've been noticed by the current government and been made a "model school" for the high school reforms being planned for next year. And I believe in the concept of charter schools and choice in education enough that my son will be starting at one this fall. "Sometimes it works really well, but sometimes it works really poorly." Ohly's words apply very well to the public school system.

I don't have much hope that Ohly's opinions would change after standing in front of 700 teachers (representing 5000 students) that prove the opposite. But I think something he mentioned at the beginning of his speech says a lot. His son is a student at one of our schools. I guess he doesn't think we're so bad after all!

Baby bites

2009-11-29T11:48:00.012+01:00

Some of my cooking skills are now going to making baby food for the littlest human in the house. I am absolutely no expert on baby nutrition, but I would like to think that I am at this point at least in the 90th percentile of well-informedness about baby food and nutrition among the group of baby mommies. So the recipes I'm making for Benjamin are based off of carefully pondering over the labels on commerical baby food, reading and re-reading all the literature that magically appears in one's mailbox once one has a baby in Sweden (from Nestlé, Semper, and other baby food companies, as well as from the pediatric clinic and the Swedish food administration), as well as some pretty good websites about baby food and nutrition.

One thing that I've noticed is that recommendations about what babies can and can't eat are even less universal than recommendations about what a pregnant woman can eat.

We're told that a breast-milk only diet until 6 months of age is best, but that it's okay to start giving some solids at 4 months if you choose to. I believe that most BVC (pediatric) nurses in Sweden say the 6-month thing because social services requires them to say so, and it's a shame that they have to feel conflicted when they feel a specific baby needs something more (as Benjamin did). However, I have a super BVC nurse who is very supportive of the super-fast food track Bennie has been on since I finally waved the white flag at 5 months. He was barely gaining any weight and was very displeased and impatient every time we nursed. Once we started him on solids, he sucked down everything we put in front of him. Already now at 7 months he's eating sandwiches and even biting and chewing bananas with a relative minimum of help. I'm sure some nursing or baby experts would hit the roof, but Benjamin has never once choked, never vomited from not being able to handle bigger bits of food (as I've seen other babies do), had most foods, especially common allergens, introduced one at a time, has never refused anything that we've given him, and is now following his weight curve very nicely. He still breast feeds on a schedule that works for us, and most importantly, he's so happy most of the time that we're starting to suspect that someone has spiked his toys with baby-nip.

The list of no-no foods we get from the pediatric nurses here in Sweden seems to be more relaxed than most; before they're a year old, the babies are not supposed to have veggies like spinach or beets (nitrates are hard on a baby's kidneys), excess salt (also kidneys), or honey (spores that can produce botulism). They also suggest we avoid sugar, nuts, and milk as a drink, but for far less "dangerous" reasons -- avoiding bad habits, avoiding choking, and avoiding replacing iron-rich foods and formula with milk, in that order. Aside from those things, everything else is pretty much A-OK from 6 months, as long as it's a reasonable consistency and the diet is varied. I've seen plenty of sites from other countries that say carrots and blueberries are a no-no until 1 year of age, despite the fact that they're sold as 4-month foods here, and I have Australian friends who have made spinach curry for their babies (which means I know, knowing these women, that no doctor has forbidden spinach for their babies). And of course, all the other moms my age here were subject to completely different recommendations when they were babies -- they ate spinach, were started on sugary juices are solids at the age of 6 weeks or something crazy, etc.

The point is, sometimes they seem to be talking out of their asses. Or at the very least, the recommendations might actually have about as much meaning as a swimmer shaving his legs. My son might or might not have a marginally larger chance at perfect health because I follow the prevailing recommendations where I live and don't feed him spinach, but perhaps the fact that he eats blueberries and carrots will cancel it out, who knows.

One site I've used a lot, at least for inspiration or comparison, is Wholesomebabyfood.com. It's run by a mom who has studied nutrition and fed all of her kids, including a set of twins, on homemade baby food. The site contains recipes for everything from single-ingredients purées to whole meals and finger foods for older babies, nutritional facts about different foods, information about storing and freezing, and even things like introducing cups and straws. The age recommendations for introducing different foods are also a bit more on the conservative side, but the plus side is that the site explains why they think a certain food might not be appropriate before 8 or 10 months -- and therefore it's easier to decide if you think it will work for your baby earlier or not.

The following recipes are perhaps not perfectly balanced for baby nutrition, but I do think I've done a pretty good job anyway. I make them fairly chunky, so by typical recommendations these foods might not be right for most babies before 8 months or even later. My baby food is also very thick (as in, not watery), as Benjamin is very particular about this as well (he's like the anti-baby...) so for other babies you might need to add extra water or formula and therefore these recipes would make more portions. Peas and tomatoes can also be tough on small tummies, the former because of the skins and the later because of the acid, but Benjamin hasn't had a huge problem with either. Milk, wheat (as in the pasta, couscous or flour) and fish are among the 8 most common allergens, so you want to be extra careful to first introduce them alone for 4 or 5 days (that is, make sure fish or wheat or dairy is the only new food the baby eats that week). But anyway... here they are:

Cod Casserole
2 dl rice
400 g cod or other white fish
600 g green peas
1 T canola oil
1 T flour
2 dl whole milk
dill

Cook the rice as directed. Boil the cod and peas until the cod is thoroughly cooked and the peas are soft. Purée the cod and peas -- and if you feel you need to, the rice -- until they are the desired consistency. Mix the oil and flour in a saucepan; add milk and simmer for a couple minutes until the sauce has thickened a bit. Add a bit of dill. Mix everything together to make a pretty green mush! This ought to be 8 full baby meals -- that is, the amount of food you'd find in a store-bought jar.

Baby Thanksgiving
400 g chicken (I used frozen thighs; make sure you get the type without salt added)
500 g sweet potato, cut up into cubes
500 g frozen green beans (not canned; that has salt)
1 T canola oil
1 T flour
2 dl milk
sage, rosemary, thyme

Pretty much the same as the last one, just with a different kind of meat and veggies! I boiled the sweet potatoes for about 20 minutes, adding the chicken after 5 minutes and the beans after 10 or so. You want it all cooked through and soft anyway. Then it was into the mixer to purée it all. The sauce is the same as well -- mix the oil and flour and then add the milk and simmer until thickened -- but this time I added some sage, rosemary and thyme instead of dill. Mix it all together, this time you get orange goop instead of bright green. And this is also 8 portions.

Lasagna
350 g couscous or crushed pasta
2 T canola oil
250 g zucchini
250 g mushrooms
500 g canned crushed tomatoes (or perhaps tomato sauce if you find it without added salt)
2 T flour
6 dl milk
50 g shredded cheese
basil, oregano, parsley, garlic powder

Cook the pasta as directed. Grate the zucchini and mushrooms on a cheese grater. Cook zucchini and mushrooms in the oil in a big pot until they're very soft. Add the tomatoes and pasta. Add spices. If needed, purée the pasta mixture in your mixer, but it might not be necessary. In another pot, milk the flour with a little bit of the milk until smooth. Add the rest of the milk and simmer for a few minutes. Add the cheese, whisking constantly so it melts without sticking to the bottom or lumping. Mix the cheese sauce and pasta mixture. This one is probably about 12 full-meal portions for baby. I actually thought it tasted pretty good myself, or at least would have with salt!

A note about the lasagna: it contains no meat, is a bit on the low side as far as protein goes, and I don't believe it contains a good source of iron. So it's not the kind of thing a baby should be eating every day, as protein and iron are big deals for baby. But I'm sure it's okay as part of a large variety of foods and meals.

Freezing
I put together a collection of small tupperwares (okay, fine, small plastic food storage containers) so that I can freeze up Bennie's food in portion sizes. You want tupperwares that hold at least 200 ml, but preferably not so much bigger than that, and that have pretty flexible sides. Glop the baby food into them portion by portion, and then when they're frozen they can be popped out (perhaps after letting them sit with their bottoms in cold water for a short while) and stored in freezer bags. It means I get away with making baby food once a week instead of hecticly trying to cook and mash and purée and whatever at every meal. The point with being able to pop them out of the tupperwares is so that you don't have to use up all the baby food before you can freeze more.

I heat Bennie's food in the microwave, as I don't believe the hype about it destroying nutrients and turning babies into cyclops, but you can thaw it out in the fridge as well.

Freezing single-ingredient baby food in ice cube trays also worked really well at the beginning, before Bennie was eating more complete meals. The Wholesomebabyfood.com site has very good info about freezing.

So, uh. Do my mood swings between political rants and housewifey baby food recipes seem too violent for you? No? Glad to hear it!

Did you bring enough for everyone to share?

2009-11-23T21:29:00.005+01:00

In our last episode, we eluded to our disgust with many Swedes' definition of "democracy".

Today's vocabulary word is "rich". And while we're at it, "poor". And "divide". And... well, either way, as often is the case, this post includes math (or perhaps lack thereof?).

Background info for non-Swedies: Sweden has been more or less run by socialist governments for most of the last century. Since the 2006 election, however, we have had a "conservative" government. If you're an American, IMMEDIATELY shift your idea of "conservative" to somewhere around the vicinity of Al Gore and Barack Obama for the remainder of this discussion.

Here you have an article that outs itself right from the start with its headline -- which is unfortunately very hard to translate properly: "More rich child-families". That is, of all the families in Sweden that have kids, they're saying more of them are rich now. (Well, fine, go ahead, YOU try to translate "Fler rika barnfamiiljer" and have the meaning come out right. Not so cocky now, are you?)

The immediate problem is how you define "rich". Is it going to be like the "rikemansskatt," the "rich man's tax" that means people with an income over a certain point pay not just municipial but also state taxes here -- and which is paid by something like half of the working population?

Yes, I do, in fact, believe there's a similar definition of "rich" being bandied around here. If you dig deep into the article (that is, read it), you'll find that the number of children living in what the article is calling "rich" families has increased from 18% to 30% since 2006.

Awesome, 30% of all families in Sweden are rich! Oh wait, it's not awesome, because rich people are evil. Boooo, 30% of all families in Sweden are evil!

But I digress... I think.

How have they defined rich? They have an index where a score of 1.0 means just being able to afford everything you need. "Rich" is what you are, then, if your family has a score of 2.0. I'm going to guess that, by that definition, my little family is "rich".

What I'm trying to say here is: I reject any definition of rich under which the label is slapped on me for being able to make a mortgage payment and feed my cats; I reject any definition of rich that encompasses 30% of the population. That is, of course, unless the other 70% are eating garbage from the dumpster. If we were talking about the world population, then I know that I am (rich, that is) and that they are (33% surviving on less than $2 a day, that is). But we're not. We're talking about Sweden, and so you have to wonder what definition of "poor" is going to be thrown up to match the wide-berthed definition of "rich".

The "poor" families in the article have a quotient of less than 1.0; they are, in other words, unable to afford the package that has been defined as the "basic standard". The article, sadly, fails to give a statistic matching the "30% are rich". However, they do say two things that at least help us to extrapolate: number 1, the percent of kids living in poor families hasn't changed since 2006. Number two, the Swedish region of Skåne has the highest percentage of kids living in poor families, and there it is 9.3%; the lowest is apparently in Jönköping, where the percentage is 3.5%.

This is the point at which all of my fellow aware Americans raise an eyebrow at how awesome it must be to have a country where well over 3 times as many kids are rich than are poor, and only then using a very mild definition of poor by global standards.

Well then, here comes my pissed-offedness: how is this information viewed, in talking-point form? "Divide widens," says one headline, and this blog links the article as evidence that the conservatives are "consciously creating a 'hungry' lower class of uneducated, sick and unemployed (who just need to 'lift themselves by their bootstraps') which can then be exploited and help to drive down wages."*

I cannot agree that these statistics are evidence of any gap having widened. When I asked a left-wing friend of mine "which is better, some people having grade A health care and some people having grade B, or everyone having grade C?" he actually answered me that it would be better if everyone had grade C -- and I don't think his view is uncommon, consciously or unconsciously, among Swedish socialists. But even I can agree that there is a "divide" in the former, A vs. B, situation (I just don't think that that divide is automatically a bad thing). But seriously, I do not see how an upwards shift in the poorkids-averagekids-richkids scale is by any definition a "widened divide". If it used to be the case that 50% of the population earned $10,000 a year and the other 50% earned $20,000, but this year the ratio is 40-60, does that constitute a "bigger divide"? I'm sorry, I'm just not grasping the math.

But for me, the best part is this: as I said in the opening of my rant, the conservatives have been in charge since the 2006 election. Those of you with your SAT glasses on will have noticed that that's also the year being examed in the article -- the increase in "rich" kids and the non-change in number of "poor" kids is since 2006. So if these however-many-but-less-than-9.3% of Swedish kids who are poor were created as a class by any set of public policies... well, whose were they, then? I'll even speculate that it's quite a feather in the current government's hat that the lower group hasn't increased in size given the current economic climate.

I really am at a loss for words about how a person's political viewpoint can allow them to believe that we live in a WORSE world if the average child's family resources has gone up without the lowest income group increasing in size. I will never understand the world view that sees it as an automatically and indepedently bad thing that life has improved for someone. The Robin Hood rhetoric is perfectly acceptable for me when we're talking American-top-1%-rich and American-Mommy-sells-crack poor, but as for this stuff I'll just continue to be amazed at our ability to whine about being possibly the most privileged 9 million people on the planet.

*Original: Man skapar medvetet en ”hungrig” underklass av lågutbildade, sjuka och arbetslösa (som bara behöver ”ta sig i kragen”) för att sedan kunna utnyttjas och hjälpa till att driva ned lönerna.

How do you say "oxymoron" in Swedish?

2009-11-22T20:13:00.003+01:00

I don't affiliate myself with a specific political party in Sweden. I am pretty solidly sure which side I'm on when the parties are organized into two blocs, but the bloc I side with contains 4 parties and I am on pretty good terms with all of them.

The one that calls themselves the Liberals, though, is the Swedish Folkpartiet. I was a member of their youth and student organization when I studied here. They say that almost all Swedish teachers are Folkpartister. However, I don't find their recent shenanigans to be all that Liberal. As much as I, as a teacher with an American background, support their ideas about a slightly more strict Swedish school system where attendance, homework, behavior and performance actually matter and are documented, I don't see what those things have to do with Liberalism with a capital L. Even less so do I understand why so many ideas about making immigrants take Swedish tests or sign a contract promising that they won't break any laws etc. has to do with a more negative-freedom-based type of political ideal.

That's why I'm glad to see today that Folkpartiet has voted down an obligatory "citizenship course" for immigrants as part of their integration program. Since I come from a country where one must pass a test in the English language and in civics in order to become naturalized, and I don't feel either of those is a bad idea, I can't say I would protest against such a program in Sweden, either. Especially since, theoretically, Sweden does, or ought to, provide training in both to all immigrants, whether they are seeking citizenship or not. But speaking the working language of your environment and knowing how the country is run and how you can vote -- these are good things for anyone who has planted themselves and their families in a new place.

An obligatory course in "Swedish values" is, however, bullkaka. I'm really rather sick of hearing the word "democracy" thrown around in this country, both inside and outside of a school context, without any sense that anyone knows what it means. Suggesting that all people who come here from another country need a chance to "reflect on the values they grew up with" and how they might not match those of the Swedish culture is not only a poor attempt at subtlety, but is also something that meshes rather poorly with the democratic ideal of freedom of opinion. Even our Minister of Intregration Nyamko Sabuni, who I generally have a lot of respect for, makes it clear how silly the idea is without perhaps meaning to: "Sabuni also said that Sweden is in a class by itself, when you compare values with those of other countries, for example that self-actualization comes before family."* What does she mean by that? Is this one of the Swedish values she thinks needs to be impressed upon immigrants to Sweden? Aside from making it clear that we're not just talking about a helpful civics course here, her choice of which Swedish "value" to use as an example makes you wonder if we really would even want everyone to think the way we do.

It's a good thing I'm already a Swedish citizen, and that the only thing I had to prove in order to become one is that I had 1500 Swedish kronor I felt like spending. If I somehow had had to promise to stick out from the crowd as little as possible or drink snaps at Midsommar or watch Donald Duck on Christmas or whatever the hell else is integral to this mystical and very unique class of values that Swedes have, I'd have been fucked.

*Original: Sabuni uppgav också att Sverige hamnar alldeles ensam på utkanten, när man jämför värderingar med andra länder, till exempel att självförverkligande går före familjen.

Professor Baby Longsleeps

2009-11-22T11:05:00.001+01:00

Every time Benjamin takes a nap that's longer than 30 minutes, I feel like I've won a prize.

That is all.

Mushroom and Pumpkin Risotto

2009-10-31T21:59:00.002+01:00

We had good friends over for dinner tonight before our male halves went to play a gig with their jazz band. Fredrik disturbed this friend deeply by mentioning his new-found distaste for meat -- "this just doesn't sit well with me," O. said, looking a little distraught. I suggested it might be because, since they work at the same company (and also worked at the same company before that), are members of 3 or 4 or ten bands together, constantly start and stop and start and stop and start again using tobacco together, and otherwise seem to live intertwined and parallel lives, that O. might be afraid a meatless future is also on the horizon for him. It didn't help that his wife said she wouldn't have a problem with that either!

I used some of the several kilos of pureed pumpking I now have on hand to try my hand at a mushroom and pumpkin risotto. It was quite good except for two things -- one, it had too little salt. But everyone knows that about my cooking at this point, so no shocker there. Two, it really is a bit light on fat and protein to be served alone. But bah, if we add more cheese or... I dunno, drink a glass of heavy cream along with it? Then it's fine! Noone complained, anyway. :)

Mushroom and Pumpkin Risotto (6 portions)

3 T butter (45 g smör)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped (3 vitlöksklyftor, finhackade)
1 yellow onion, chopped (1 gul lök, hackad)
1 lb assorted mushrooms, chopped (450 olika sorters svamp, hackade)
3/4 c cracked wild rice (2 dl vildris)
1 1/2 c long-grain rice (4 dl parboiled ris)
20 oz. pumpkin meat (600 g färdigpurerad pumpa)*
5 c vegetable bullion (1,2 l grönsaksbuljong)
1 t salt (1 tsk salt)
1 t sage (1 tsk salvia)
1 t thyme (1 tsk timjan)
6 T dried cranberries (6 msk torkade tranbär)
6 T grated parmesan (6 msk riven parmesan)

In a large pot, saute garlic and onions until tender. Add the mushrooms and continue to saute until they are soft. Add the rice and cook another minute or two. Mix in the pumpkin until it coats the rice and then add the bullion, sage, thyme and salt. Bring to a boil; lower heat and simmer for about 30 minutes, adding more liquid if needed. Sprinkle over the cranberries and cheese after dishing up on individual plates.

Calories per serving: 455
Protein: 11 g
Fat: 10 g
Carbs: 79 g

*I believe pumpkin typically comes in 15 oz (450 g) cans. I'm sure this amount it fine. I just happened to have 20 oz from the pumpkin I baked this morning.

Hazelnut patties -- engh, okay.

2009-10-30T16:44:00.002+01:00

Well hello there. I'm writing twice in the space of a couple days. Imagine that!

So, Fredrik's announcement that he now believes it's unnecessary for us to kill da widdle baby aminals in order to eat, I was actually quite pleased. I've never been a stranger to such thoughts myself, and as a matter of fact, I ate vegetarian for about a year before marrying my carnivorous ex-husband a decade ago. I actually believe that pairing up causes the world to have far fewer vegetarians than it would have otherwise.

But I also was a little pissed off, in a playful sort of way. Here I've spent a good long time trying to find recipes that both he and I like and that contain plenty of vegetables, balanced nutrients, and all that other blah-de-blah. And it happened more than once that, when I asked him what he thought of a new recipe I tried, he could comment "It's okay, but there's no meat in it!" Indeed, an entire series of "All-meat parties," a potluck gathering that entailed very specific rules about the dishes people brought, was spawned because Fredrik and another friend joked about faintness and iron-deficiency when presented once with a meatless meal. On top of that, I'm the shopper and usually the cooker in this family.

What this means is that I welcomed his new-found interest in vegetarianism with both a sort of inner "yay, new project!" excitement as well as a desire to get him to work for it! First I suggested that we start by cutting back on the mammals rather than attempting to entirely quit meat cold-turkey (ha.). I think I could easily adjust to life with beef and pork, but I'm not quite ready to give up cheese, even though I know that a little baby cow has died for my cheese...

I also said he'd best have picked out at least 2 vegetarian recipes that he wanted to cook this week, before I made my weekly trip to the store.

I noticed a trend when he started sending me recipe ideas and I compared them to my own ideas: I was attempting to come up with recipes that simply didn't contain meat -- indeed, that perhaps never were intended to contain meat in their natural form -- but Fredrik seemed to be finding recipes that contained meat-replacements -- spaghetti "meat sauce" made with soy-based fake meat and a recipe for hazelnut patties were his first offerings. :)

He made the hazelnut patties last night, along with a very good tsatziki (which was our best guess as to what might taste good with hazelnut patties...). I won't share the recipe with you because, quite frankly, we weren't impressed and decided not to make it again in the future. It's possible that we could turn it into something good, but we'll have to come back to it later.

In the meantime, I'm very excited about a cheesy spinach pasta I'm going to try!

I'm also pretty jazzed about pumpkin. I just made about 2 kg of pureed pumpkin after following the directions in these videos: Processing pie for pumpkin. I used a big jack-o-lantern pumpkin, but it turned out just great for cooking purposes. I've got a couple small pumpkins that I'm going to process for baking, and I'm looking forward to playing around with cooking with the rest. And Bennie thought it was tasty just as it was!

Vege... wha?

2009-10-27T21:00:00.003+01:00

My husband has decided that vegetarianism is the way to go.

Seriously, just like that.

Like, say you're lying in bed with a book, next to your husband and his book, winding down at the end of the day. And he sort of mumbles lazily, "I think I'll have lunch with my coworkers tomorrow instead of taking leftovers." Or "By the way, I'm playing squash on Thursday after work, hope that's okay." Although this was sort of more like "by the way, I think animals are conscious and experience suffering and therefore we ought to quit eating meat. Oh, and the cats are due for their vaccinations."

Okay, interesting! But like I said to him, it's a crying shame he doesn't like cilantro...

Abyss

2009-09-03T09:22:00.005+02:00

Benjamin is lying in his buggy basket on the floor. Sleeping soundly after having a whole big bottle of milk that I thawed out yesterday but didn't end up using. Twisting and turning in silent irritation over the flies that keep landing on his face, but not waking up. Generally looking like an angel.

Mom is sitting on the couch, staring at him and bawling her eyes out.

I will never forgot turning my fingers into bloody stumps on the jagged walls of the deep, dark nightmare of losing our first baby and seeing it treated like a piece of trash.

I will also never, ever forget that I have gotten off easy. A woman I've never met but would like to call my friend has had the completely unnecessary and cruel experience of living through a repeat second trimester loss. Another acquaintence has survived the unspeakable experience of one full-term stillbirth, followed later by the death of her 5-day old little boy. Since Benjamin came less than a year after our loss, the period of time in which I was forced to wonder "What do you call a mother without a child?" for my own sake was forgivingly short. I feel deeply humbled by the stories that I know are worse than mine, and desperately hopeful that they will eventually have a similarly "happy" ending.

That is why I want anyone who has children to read the following blog. Over and over again. Until your eyes bleed, seriously.

Mirne's blog.

I know too many women who understand, or at least have a fraction of an idea about, the terrible road Mirne has just started down -- and I hate the vile taste of having to add: for the third time.

What's the uplifting punch line? None, I'm afraid. Sorry to bring you down. But you knew the name of the blog when you came in.

Harald is a nag.

2009-08-17T20:38:00.002+02:00

Alright, alright. I'm starting to have time to blog again. And even to cook sometimes.

On the other hand, my computer has now started to show signs of old age (the warranty expired a month ago, after all), so aside from no longer having working speakers, it decides to type not one but two "I" characters every time I hit the "I" key. You will have to, therefore, forgive any consequent misspellings.

Tomorrow I hope to post some recipes, but tonight I'll leave you with this: Fredrik has just walked into our bedroom to tell our son, who I put to bed 3 minutes ago after his extensive good-night routine, that "every night you start to cry, and every night I put your pacifier back in and tell you that every night you start to cry and I put your pacifier back in..." I feel that if Benjamin doesn't learn to fall asleep on his own soon, this meta-routine will get out of hand.

Benny, let me tell you about Erectile Dysfuntion...

2009-05-07T17:07:00.004+02:00

So I've just finished the day's 15th or so breast-feeding session, after earlier contemplating the idea that I might get sideways, angry glances for doing so in public in Las Vegas (you know, where prostitution and marijuana are legal, right?), and wouldn't you know, I find something at CNN.com that gives me a related opportunity to say "Grow the fuck up, America":

Congressman wants to ban ED ads.

Admittedly, my last post about what people don't want their kids to see on TV would have been a "Grow the fuck up, Great Britain," but still. Seriously. Ms. Shelley Hix replies to the article:

"Thank you Jim Moran. I have voiced oposition to these ads since day one. I have teenage grandsons and have to be on guard every single minute they are visiting and watching TV. While we are on the subject of ads, the women’s feminine products are getting more explicit by the day. It’s time to get them under control also."

Dear god! Her teenage grandsons! Someone might be forced to explain erections and menstruation to them (things which I'm sure they know NOTHING about yet), and gosh darnit all to heck, do they expect the boys' FAMILY to have to discuss it with them? Heavens to Betsy, the nerve of some people and their naughty TV ads!

Time in a bottle

2009-04-26T13:59:00.003+02:00

So, as I'm sure you've figured out, this is why I have no time to blog:

No time to blog, I say? Hell, since April 17, I barely have time to piss...

Reality Check

2009-04-07T06:40:00.006+02:00

Needless to say -- as I'm sure it has escaped no one's notice by now that I am an inveterate atheist -- finding time for prayer is not a difficulty I anticipate having with motherhood.

I'm pretty sure Fredrik and I had this discussion before, as I felt a strong deja vu after reading this article. But what I can't get over is the bit about how the first woman's faith was tested when watching her mother-in-law die.

It is an extremely common story. I had faith in God, then something bad happened to me or near me, and that shook my faith. Of course, it always ends with the person's faith being restored along with a new sense of God's mysterious ways or some such; otherwise the story wouldn't be told.

The thing I always wonder about these people whose faith takes a beating when something bad happens to them is: are they delightfully sheltered and obtuse, or are they simply self-centered and smug? As far as I can see, these are the only two options.

By the time you're old enough to watch your 82-year old mother-in-law go through a long period of suffering before death, you ought to be acutely aware of the fact that suffering happens, and that many people in the world endure much worse. I am not by any means trying to diminish the pain that this woman went through before succumbing to death, and it is rare that I would advocate any "ratings system" for how horrible one situation is compared to another. But that death often comes after pain and suffering, especially for people toward the end of our average life span, cannot -- or SHOULD not -- be a surprise to anyone, and when placed in comparison to the kind of lives that are led by starving children and mistreated women in war-torn countries, I find it odd that it would be the common and inevitable that would shake a person's faith.

So like I said, the first option is that a person having this experience has simply led a life so free from information from the outside world that they are unaware such suffering, and much worse, exists. At some point -- in the case of this woman I'd have to estimate at mid-life -- they see some version of it with their own eyes and, amazingly, are shocked.

The second option is that these people of faith are well aware of the fact that the clothes on their backs have most likely been sewn by children in sweat shops where $1 separates them from actual technical slavery, or that children in their own country can be mowed down in the middle of the street by drunk drivers. The fact that they are not shaken until suffering enters their own lives, that their own pain can make them reflect on what God is up to, would therefore seem to suggest that they've lived a life lacking in humility. "That people suffer tremendously in this world is something I am aware of and it has never given me pause about God, but that I should suffer phases me, as I am different -- special, better than others, and God isn't supposed to punish me."

Perhaps I appear incredibly unfair and hypocritical. But bear with me, it's subtle. I fully respect the right of a person to cry bitterly over a hang-nail if the hang-nail is the worst thing that has ever happened to them. But only if they can do so while acknowledging that other people suffer as well, and that their hang-nail just might be small beans to another person. That's the most important part of having empathy for another person, is understanding that the pain they feel cannot be measured by putting a metric on the triggering event, as if it can all be put on a scale. And there are few of us who haven't had the experience of understanding a situation or a hardship better only when we have experienced it ourselves.

That's exactly why I raise my eyebrows at this "God" aspect of insight or lack thereof; it's why I can be amazed at a 40+ year old mother having her first or strongest epiphany about how the life that she believes was endowed by and is controlled by an omnipotent being isn't always fair -- and more importantly, coming out on the other side of the experience without modifying the skewed view of how terrible and tragic your own situation and suffering are in the grand scheme of things. These stories always end with "and then she found her faith in God again" -- like I said, otherwise they wouldn't be told, because there's no news value in "and so she finally came to her senses" -- but not because she comes to realize that her own suffering was really minor in the vast cesspool of all that is wrong with the world, not because she realizes that "Hey, my mother-in-law was 82 years old, had children, grandchildren, a fulfilling, long life," etc., but because she somehow finds a support group that convinces her that God works in mysterious ways and that he has a reason for inflicting unspeakable hardship on his better quality minions.

I react strongly because I have intimate, first-hand experience with how this kind of golden opportunity for a person to develop a little more understanding for their fellow man is totally lost in favor of some sort of bolstering modification of ones own sense of superiority and worth of pity. So I'm reacting more to those people than to the woman in the article, who I, of course, do not know, and I can't say that she doesn't now spend a few weeks each year feeding the poor in Africa and teaching her children how that might fit into God's grand scheme. No, you're right, I certainly don't spend a few weeks each year feeding the poor in Africa, either. But I am not in the difficult position of justifying myself in regards to a faith that would encourage me to do so.

I'll refrain from saying that, since she's Catholic, her attitude toward Africa is more likely to be saving them from condoms than savings them from starvation. Damn, I didn't refrain. It's like I have tics.

Period of Adjustment

2009-04-04T07:49:00.002+02:00

I wonder how long it will last -- this tingliness that goes up and down my spine every time I realize that I have a brand new, shiny president with an actual brain: U.S., Europe need to drop attitudes, Obama says.

Life Music

2009-03-31T14:58:00.004+02:00

I feel so delightfully teen-aged. Here I sit, poking my belly and trying to urge this kid to get on with it, but also listening to some recent hit ballads over and over again and getting all schmarmy about the lyrics and how awesome they are. Now, I'm not about to carve Sonja Aldén's name into my arm and claim she's the only human being on earth who really GETS ME and KNOWS MY SOUL (yes, for those of you who are my age, this IS a Kurt Cobain reference), but I figured I would share.

This is the song of Lori's 2007:

The song of Lori's 2008:

And now, 2009, with an unfortunately virus-stricken Sarah Dawn Finer:

Hopefully next year's Melodifestival will include a song about winning the lottery and seeing all your dreams come true -- I would gladly take that as my autobiographical song for 2010. ;)

Suspend your disbelief and outrage

2009-03-19T17:43:00.012+01:00

I am becoming increasingly aware of how possibly strange it is for me to be writing a blog in English that often takes up Swedish issues and fires retaliatory missiles at newspaper articles written in Swedish. Hopefully, though, I can explain enough of the article in question to give you an idea of what I’m ACTUALLY musing/ranting about, which is hopefully something interesting in a more general sense.

This is where we start: "Tingeling"-försoningsblommor från SVT

Now the explanation for people who are not fluent in the Swedish language or the Swedish culture.

Every year since 1955, a competition has been held called the Eurovision Song Contest. I have heard it compared to American Idol in people’s attempts to explain, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison (and not just because I like Eurovision and don’t like Idol). Each country in (an ever-expanding definition of) Europe who wants to and who follows the rules* can send a song to compete in the contest. In a process that can only be called a whorish mutating of democracy**, viewers call in to vote for the song they like best (but are not allowed to vote for their own country). Whichever song gets the most votes wins, will most likely be played to death on the radio, and next year’s contest will be arranged by that country, bringing them no small amount of tourism, attention, and other positive revenue.

Of course, the countries that participate in ESC all have different strategies for choosing which song will be sent. It often starts with people sending recorded songs in to a committee to be judged. I heard a few years ago that only 11 songs came in to the committee in Moldova, and in many countries the committee just picks a song and gets ready to send it to the European contest. In Sweden, well over 3000 songs are sent in each year, often representing some of the most famous song-writers and artists in the country. These contributions are narrowed down to 32, and in “Melodifestivalen,” a series of televised semi-finals and second chances and finals competitions, a finalist is picked by a manner of telephone voting similar to that of the European final. These competitions, especially the final, have a large viewer base, and there’s always some sort of “intermission entertainment” to amuse us viewers while the voting is going on.

This year, the European final is being held in Moscow, since Russia’s song won last year’s competition. Because of this, the intermission entertainment in this year’s Melodifestivalen final was, shall we say, Russia-themed. Two fairly un-funny comedians, Pihlman and Pål, who bored me and others to death in all of the semi-final intermissions did a sketch where they were trying to “sell” some Russian mafia guys on performing their song “Tingeling.” The two eventually manage to convince them to perform the song on-stage in Stockholm at the Melodifestivalen final, at which point they cut away from the film and the live performance began.

The live performance was a blatant play on every possible stereotype that Swedes, and many others, have about Russian people. You don’t have to understand Swedish to get the idea, so if you’re able to, have a look at the video: Tingeling på ryska. Fast-forward to the stage performance, which comes after about 4 minutes and 25 seconds. You’ve got Slavic folk musicians, Red Army uniformed officers, slutty female eye-candy dancers (this was probably the most offensive to most Swedes), Russian nesting dolls, techno disco, an alto opera singer, those Cossack-type dancers, The Internationale, and even a “dancing bear”. “One more time for the Motherland!” says the singer towards the end.

Someone in our board-games-and-Melodifestival circle of friends had read the day before that DN’s ESC reporter thought it was the “worst intermission act I’ve ever seen in Melodifestivalen.” Since I’ve never been a fan of the judgement of the journalist in question, I wasn’t surprised when I thought the whole act was hilarious. Fredrik, and if I recall correctly another friend, agreed. In case it wasn’t clear enough that the act was meant as sarcasm, as irony, as a joke on the Swedish people and their stereotypes about Russia, it was made even clearer by the show’s host when she encouraged the public to change the channel right before the performance and said “Um… thanks… I suppose I should say…” when the act was over. It was, in other words, MEANT to be terrible, and that was the whole joke.

Obviously, neither Russia nor Sweden got the joke.

The Russian embassy is apparently in a huff. Their spokesman has said, “I find it hard to believe that Sweden would show such ignorance in their interpretation and image of Russia.” His sentiment is seemingly echoed throughout Sweden. A DJ from the radio station I listened to went to the Russian embassy and stood outside with a big sign reading "Forgive us!" and she's either a very good actress or she was actually very seriously upset. You can see in the comments after the linked story that people found the act to be “cultural racism” and “pure ignorance of real Russian culture” and simply “make me embarrassed to call myself Swedish.” Swedish television sent flowers and an apology to the embassy, but now seem to have taken it back, which is either a very good idea or simply very clumsy, I'm not sure.

Heavens. Long explanation over, waxing about people’s ability to think in layers begins.

I’m fond of actor and comedian Denis Leary. Currently he stars in a television series called “Rescue Me.” I’ve never seen the show, but I recall when there was an outrage over one episode of the show. In it, Leary’s character rapes his ex-wife. I say rape, because I believe that that’s the proper label for what occurred in the scene in question, though I know that there are many people who would NOT consider it rape. Many people believe that being married, or having been married to or intimate with a person, or perhaps other circumstances that add subtlety to the scene, do not qualify it as rape, whereas others of us recognize that the mere fact that a person says no is all that matters.

Because of these very heated points of contention in what does or does not constitute rape, I can understand why some activists might have had a knee-jerk reaction when seeing the scene. They imagine that, since the main character of the show is using physical force to have intercourse with his ex-wife when she fairly clearly isn’t consenting, that the show is therefore condoning this action and/or perpetrating the myth that a woman simply can’t say no once she’s married, or any other similar claim that, no matter how outrageous, an unfortunately large number of people seem to believe.

But I contend that to blow up in outrage over a scene like this and for those reasons is actually rather childish, in a way that makes me both despair of and understand why American movies are often so very void of any shred of nuance. People are apparently unable to distance themselves from the idea that main character = good guy and therefore main character’s actions = actions endorsed/encouraged by the media’s creators.

If you watch the movie Leaving Las Vegas, do you feel that Nicolas Cage is encouraging you to become an alcoholic and actually attempt to drink yourself to death? Or that the inclusion of Elizabeth Shue’s character is the producers’ way of telling us that prostitution is A.O.K.? Do we see the series “Dexter” as a rubber stamp of approval for serial homicide, or “The Sopranos” as an endorsement of mafia life? What is the difference between our ability to distance ourselves from these flawed characters and from Leary’s character in “Rescue Me”? My theory is that these other shows and characters make more of an effort to rub our faces in how flawed or criminals or pathetic the main characters are – an unnatural attempt. We need to constantly be reminded that so-and-so isn’t a perfect person and that he does bad, naughty things that we shouldn’t do in order for someone, somewhere to not get pissed off about how the show or movie is saying it’s okay to kill-maim-rape-drink-steal-etc. In most cases we can’t even rest unless this flawed person get their come-uppance in some obvious blaze of fanfare at the end. So the problem people have with “Rescue Me” is, sadly, that it’s too realistic; it allowed for a person to have bad sides and good sides without something separating them, Sesame Street style, FOR us, and without the episode ending with him getting corn-holed in a prison cell or something similar.

I believe Leary’s response to the outrage was something similar; something about how TV and films have to be able to show people who might exist in the real world without pretending that everyone who does something bad always gets punished and without pretending that firefighters can’t be rapists (which is actually a backlash for the idea that rape isn’t just something done by strangers in back alleys!).

But unfortunately, all you have to do is look at the majority of American TV and films to see that we’re not adult enough to handle anything between superhero and supervillian, and we’re woefully unable to see the occurance of an event on screen as anything other than a thumbs-up to said event in real life.

I say American TV and films, but not because I think they’re alone in having this problem. Whereas the strategy of an American film might be to make sure a character who is a rapist is positively vulgar in every other possible aspect, the strategy of, say, a Swedish film would be to avoid the topic altogether as to not have to make the judgement call between what’s realistic and what’s right.

You may feel that I digress. Perhaps a bit. But not as far as it may seem.

I believe it’s the same inability to separate the “main character” or the producer or presenter of a program or an idea from the actual endorsement of that idea that causes people to soil their panties over the “cultural racism” that was the now-famous Tingeling sketch. Most people are apparently unable to see the irony. But even those that do have claimed that that’s no excuse; that it’s still racist and unfair to display stereotypes even when we’re making it perfectly clear that they ARE stereotypes and that we’re actually making fun of ourselves for having them. I also believe that it’s deeply hypocritical for Swedes to get a bug up their ass about this “cultural racism”.

If the sketch begins with a scene involving a mafia boss, does that really mean we're saying ALL Russians are mobsters? Or is the only way to not be racist to pretend that there's no mafia in Russia? Seriously? So just like with the episode of "Rescue Me," what occurs in real life and being honest about it is not quite as important as trying not to mention it or trying to make it a bit prettier.

I suppose you might say that it's one thing in a drama and another thing when we're using it for comedy and joking. I'm not convinced. If I were to say, in a serious discussion, "There are a lot of alcoholics in Russia," which is statistically true (5% of the population drinks an average of 27 liters of pure alcohol a year), you don't think I would get a new one ripped for me and be accused of utilizing stereotypes? (Note that the alcohol stereotype was not used in the Tingeling sketch, which seems like an excellent judgement call.) But the thing is -- and now I'm getting ahead of myself in my argument -- it's apparently fine to state in a debate article in a Swedish newspaper that "tens of millions of Americans are high school drop-outs and illiterates" without anyone getting pissed off, despite the fact that it's at best a twisted version of the truth.***

One commenter asks if the assertion that Tingeling was okay doesn’t mean that we can go ahead and tongue-in-cheek freely about Swedish stereotypes about Jews or Gypsies. My answer to that is, according to a little sampling, both yes and no.

A few years ago, the host of Melodifestivalen dressed up as a Native American – leather, beads, huge feathered headdress, and a stereotypical deep-voiced grunting language that was translated by the other host. And lest I forget to mention it, he was wearing leather chaps and no pants. If Jon Stewart had done so at the Oscars, I believe an outraged walk-out would have occurred. But there was no outrage over Henrik Schyffert’s Native American. SVT certainly didn't send flowers and an apology to the American embassy. Bare-assed grunting Cherokee is apparently okay with the Swedish people.

There used to be a cat food commercial that ran here in which a Japanese or other similarly far east woman brought home food for her cat. The food had Chinese lettering and a picture of a cat on it and, with full-on Manga-style facial expression and cutesy Japanese accent, the girl proudly stated that she’d brought home yummy food for Fluffy. Her live-in Swedish boyfriend cringed at the idea of giving their cat this clearly inferior product, and instead fed the critter Whiskas or Friskies or whatever instead. This commercial ran for quite a while, and I never got an inkling that anyone but me found it offensive.

So how come bare-assed Cherokee and the “don’t you know that Chinese people EAT cats!” Manga-girl commercial are okay in Sweden but did not sit well with me? Because Native Americans and far-east Asians are too far away for Swedes to give a damn about. There are none of the former and virtually none of the latter here. I, on the other hand, grew up in a culture that contained and was acutely aware of both Native Americans and Asian immigrants. I’m not claiming that Americans are more cultural sensitive than Swedes, but rather that we all become acutely aware of offending a certain group if that group is right around the corner and has stood up for itself before we learned to join in and stand up for them, too.

But what about when Swedes ruthlessly make fun of Norwegians on television? Or Danes? Or of actual Swedes with funny dialects? You bet your ass that that’s okay, too. And I feel that, if you’ve read my blog up to this point, you don’t need me to go on a tirade right now about how very accepted it is to make fun of Americans. And not just make fun of us, but to use cultural stereotypes about us in actual serious situations. It is considered perfectly acceptable for a Swede to make a general statement about how Americans are and how that relates to why Swedish health care or education or parenting style or literature or whatever the hell else is better, and no one else involved in the debate seems to have a hard time accepting it as fact, because they’ve grown up with the same stereotypes. None of them seems to reflect on the fact that the country with the world’s third largest land area and third largest population, almost entirely made up of people whose families have been in the country for a number of generations that can be counted on one hand since immigrating from all possible corners of the earth is probably the last culture that you can make sweeping generalizations about just because you heard once from your big brother that…

But now I seem to digress again. And yet, again, I don’t really. Why is it okay to rip on Norwegians and Danes and Skåningar and Dalmän and Americans, often right to their faces and without remorse? Just as Native Americans and Chinese are too far away to require sensitivity from the Swedish people, Norwegians and Danes are too close. Americans are also too close, not by virtue of geography, but by virtue of the fact that Swedes, like many others, have developed a sense of entitlement and ownership of American culture, so the same thing that allows them to make ignorant generalizations about Americans is what allows them to do it without remorse.

So you have direct racism – that is, remorselessly using our stereotypes as if they were true – towards Indians, Asians, Scandinavians and Americans – and that’s okay. What is it that makes this at best INDIRECT racism – exploring and admitting our own stereotypes about a people – so much more wrong when applied to Russians? Do they belong in the same no-man’s land in the middle with Jews and Arabs and Bosnians and others that we feel are not distant enough and yet not close enough to us to make fun of? If that’s the case, then I’m still skeptical, since I’m pretty sure exploiting stereotypes of Spaniards and Italians and Germans is also well on this side of acceptable in this country, and you have to wonder if we all have a list somewhere in the subconscious part of our brains that lists which groups are okay to splash stereotypes on and which are off-limits.

The thing is, if you’ve read this far, you might think that I think that this is an all or nothing proposition. You may think that I believe all cultures should be open to ridicule and joking. Or you may think that I believe you shouldn’t make fun of any culture at all if you feel it’s not okay to make fun of a certain, specific culture. But the thing is, I don’t actually think that’s true. I accept the fact that we find it okay to rip on Norwegians in this country but that we don’t think it’s okay to joke about stereotypes about Jews. I even think it's okay to joke about Americans -- we often deserve it -- as long as people might try to stop their crappy habit of wildly generalizing about us even in serious and important discussions and debates. But this is because, just like in judging characters in movies and books or judging an individual for who he is rather than what country he came from, I believe there has to be nuance in everything. What upsets me is not the fact that cultural stereotypes for the sake of jokes are acceptable in some situations and not in others, but rather, the self-righteousness of people who seem to think that it's all black and white AND that they themselves are paragons of virtue in regards to never, ever being racist, when in fact they bear on their shoulders racism so deeply rooted that they do not recognize it as such. And some of which is much more insidious than just thinking the idea of the Russian mafia singing a song called “Tingeling” is entertaining.

And if you look at a lot of the bits that went into Tingeling, tell me, which parts actually WERE offensive and which parts simply are, well, Russian? Can a coherent argument be made for what went over the line? Were the big dancing Russian nesting dolls racist because they were, well, dancing? Or the Russian folk musicians because they were probably Swedish and not Russian? To insert an obscure Larry Wilmore joke here, I expect all the outraged people to soon progress to talking in a maskedly condescending tone about how beautiful Russian children are.

At the end of the day, I just think that society’s definition of what is racist and what is not is about as solid as whether low-riders or boot cuts are in this season. Being pissed off about how your license money (that you pay in order to have independent television free of political influence, ha!) is going to this horribly insensitive travesty of prejudice is mostly about you making sure everyone else hears you being outraged and notices that you’re playing by the rules du jour.

For those of you who can read Swedish and would enjoy a much more articulate and organized musing about what is racism and what is not, have a look at the third installment in Maciej Zaremba’s “I väntan på Sverige”: Vilse i mångfalden.

*Georgia's intended entry for this year has been disqualified, as it was called "We Don't Want to Put In" and was obviously a political dig, with Russia as the host country to boot. Lebanon was interested in competing a few years ago, but was rejected because they said they would skip over the Israeli entry in their broadcast of the program.

**Aside from the obvious bits about how pay-per-call telephone voting is not exactly fair and balanced, you have the fact that, say, Monaco (36,000 inhabitants!) contributes just as many points to the final tally as Russia. I chuckled one year when the woman giving the Russian points said something like "Hi, this is Russia's 100 million people calling to give the votes to all you who consider yourselves Europe!" The fact that most countries, especially the eastern ones, tend to vote for the neighbors seems to bother everyone but does not strike me as odd -- it's not strange that they would like similar music or would have heard those songs more often and had a chance to get used to them etc. And when Greece chooses to do their song IN Greek, well, is it any wonder that Cyprus is more likely to vote for them than any other country?

***The article, about how the Swedish job market is being filled up by low-paying, "demeaning" jobs, was on DN.se 5 years ago. I wrote a short essay on it for my Swedish class. It can no longer be found on their website.

We like sinners, but not THAT much

2009-03-11T13:44:00.004+01:00

What is the purpose of the church? Of Jesus's death on the cross? Of the idea of original sin? If I may humbly assume that I've understood the whole idea, none of us is free from sin, which is why Jesus needed to die. Our relationship with the church and the sacrament of Communion exist as ways of bringing his forgiveness to us sinners born 2000 years after he died.

Right?

Nah. The world's churches want us to take that with a grain of salt.

Some -- like many of the evangelical types in my homeland -- have quite simply become clubs into which the only most (seemingly) my-shit-don't-stink non-sinners are allowed and all others who deviate from their idea of Christian perfection are shunned. A club where only people that don't exist, according to the club's charter, are allowed. Heaven forbid they step down from their high horses in order to actually act according to God's word and accept fellow sinners into the flock, attempting to help them, rather than persisting in the weekly round of patting each other on the back for being squeaky clean that allows them a sweet amnesia over how very un-perfect they are the rest of the week.

The Catholic church in Brazil apparently has a less restrictive entrance exam, where child rapists are still within the stomachable level of sin, but health care providers that take proper care of abused children are just going to have to start their own little club in hell: Excommunicated doctor hailed for abortion on child rape victim.

That's okay, excommunicated doctors, being in with the in-crowd isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Feminist? Yes, as a matter of fact, I am.

2009-03-08T14:57:00.006+01:00

Not everyone has the distinct privilege of having some people in their life that see them as a truckling slave of the patriarchy and some other people in their life that see them as a condescending amazon harpy. I'm tickled to be able to straddle both sides of that fence. In honor of International Women's Day, I have some delcarations to make.

like to cook, bake, sew, clean, and take care of other people.
don’t know much about cars, beer, weapons, or sports, and I couldn’t care less.
think my family is more important than my career.
cannot do nearly as much when pregnant as I could before I was pregnant, and am not afraid to say so.
cry easily, and don’t try to hide it.
will let my daughter play with dolls if she wants to.
have chosen to be a school teacher rather than a research scientist based on what I enjoy doing rather than on other people’s expectations of what good girls or smart girls can, cannot, should, or should not do.
believe that biology has a hand in determining general differences in how women and men think and act and what they value and aspire to.
get irritated with small minds who consider me a subservient, misled, ignorant, old-fashioned victim with no right to call herself a feminist, all because of the above.
expect to be seen as an individual and not as a constantly on-trial representative of my gender.

have little to no interest in make-up, fashion or shoes.
am a mammal and have hair pretty much everywhere.
expect to be treated with respect at work and with acknowledgement of my intelligence and hard-won knowledge, with the same wage as if I were a man, and have raised a royal fucking ruckus when I am not.
expect my husband to do more while I’m pregnant because I’m able to do less.
think love and respect must always be earned and are never unconditionally deserved, even by your own children or parents.
will let my son play with dolls if he wants to.
have chosen to temporarily work as an engineer because it pays better and is more flexible than being a teacher, and that’s what I need in my life right now.
believe that no level of knowledge of the biological differences between men and women and their general consequences for how we think and act should ever drive us to adopt overly generalized, simplified educational, political or social structures or stop our efforts to treat men and women equally and give them the same opportunities.
get irritated with small minds who consider me a man-hating, baby-hating, career-obsessed bitter traitor and lump me in with all other self-professed feminists that I actually strongly disagree with, all because of the above.
expect to be seen as a nuanced and shifting shade of gray instead of a constantly on-trial representative of one political, ideological, or philosophical black or white.

Even though most people's definition of the word differs from mine, I still like to call myself a feminist, and I think it sucks that other sensible people have to feel that the label can't apply to them.

So very unsurprised

2009-03-05T07:35:00.004+01:00

Ha. Ha ha.

Mormon Utah Best at Porn Surfing.

Utah has the most porn surfers in the country, with 5.4 of 1000 households having some kind of subscription to pornography sites.
Of the 10 states at the top of the porn surfing statistics, 8 of them were red states in the 2008 presidential election.
Of the 10 states with the least porn surfing, 6 of them were blue states in the 2008 presidential election.
States with laws against homosexual partnership exhibit 11% more porn surfing than the average.
Statistics were based on a study of porn sites' customers during the period 2006-2008, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Today I like Maciej Zaremba

2009-03-02T19:27:00.002+01:00

A friend of mine tipped me off to the fact that DN is running a new series of articles by Maciej Zaremba entitled "I väntan på Sverige". When I see the name, I have a very distinct tingling the tells me I've read an article by this person before, and had very strong feelings about it, almost assuredly even to the point of trying to write to the author. The thing is, I don't remember if I wrote to the author in order to tell him or her that I thought they were a genius or that I thought they were a drooling idiot. Or wait, now I'm feeling like this article from the past wasn't in DN, but rather, in the newspaper or newsletter for Liberala Studenter? Yes, that's ringing a bell...

Anything is possible, but I can at least say that today's article falls in the genius category. Svensk? Var god dröj! explores the long, unorganized, and pretty hopeless process of integrating a refugee with today's rules and practices. Much of the article condemns SFI, the system of courses in the Swedish language for new immigrants, but the author even discusses a myriad of "fluff" courses that some of the article's subjects have been sent to, where they learn about hygiene and walks in the forest and visits to IKEA. I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was THAT bad.

The problem with these "fluff" measures is not, as some particularly boxed-in thinkers might assume as soon as they see me or someone else complaining about it, is not that it's "a waste of taxpayer's money" and all that happy reactionary jazz. It's that it's a waste of the refugee's time. I know that integrating into Swedish society as far as understanding how people think and work and paying taxes and taking the bus and all those kinds of things are hurdles that have to be hopped over, and it's cool that someone has thought of that at all, but the twin assumptions that a fully educated dentist or doctor from Baghdad both needs to learn how to wash his hands and feels it's a good use of his time doing so before he starts learning the language is so wrong in so many ways.

Translated highlights from the article:

When explaining that there apparently is no authority or bureaucracy in Sweden that keeps any records of what refugees' career and educational backgrounds are, Zaremba reflects on how ironic that is given that "For decades, the State has registered which tiles Svensson has in his summer house as well as when he masturbated for the first time. No aspect of our daily lives has been deemed too trivial to keep track of."

"When we take for granted that a curriculum designed for study-shy teenagers in Täby is also the best for Iraqi corporals and Ethiopian doctors -- does that speak of our passion for equality or just our arrogance?" I don't require a second thought before answering arrogance, hands-down. The best and most ambitious goal of the official Swedish curriculum and documents describing the teaching philosophy of the country's school system is to try to make sure the entire learning experience is adapted toward each individual student's specific needs. But as a teacher, I can promise you that that's a theory; in practice, noone meets more resistance from the Swedish Task Force for Equality, Hypocrisy and Shooting Ourselves in the Feet than a teacher who attempts to claim that two different students might need two different types of pedagogy. T use example from the article, they can't fathom how we could claim that Kurdish illiterates and Iranian academics do not belong in the same classroom, but they see no problem with assuming that both people need to be taught about good hygiene whereas a recent arrival from Poland or Germany does not.

This is why, sadly, the Warsaw school described in the article -- where they intensively train doctors and other healthcare personel in Swedish, English, French, Danish, and you-name-it so that they can hit the ground running when arriving in a new country -- is a concept that is a long way from being copied here in Sweden, despite the fact that it's obviously successful and puts SFI to shame. It's truly sad that a school in Poland is so much better equipped to integrate people into Swedish society than the standard offering IN Sweden, but it's not surprising, either.

Talking to children is scary

2009-02-28T10:31:00.005+01:00

Have I mentioned how often I think "Wow, people are idiots"? Well, it's often.

According to this article from CNN.com, the BBC is receiving complaints about a new host on one of its children's programs. The host, Cerrie Burnell, whose right arm stops below her elbow. People are apparently complaining that this one-and-a-half-armed woman is "scaring their children." A quote from the article:

In one chat room, a father lamented that Burnell being on the show forced him to have conversations with his child about disabilities.

Now, those of you who know me a little, what do you suppose I'm going to say? Say it with me now, everyone together: DON'T WATCH THE SHOW, THEN.

But aside from that obvious nugget of wisdom, what the hell makes people so scared of talking to their children? First of all, are people who spawn kidlings unaware of the fact that there are certain talks that they simply cannot avoid having with their children? For those of you who are about to argue that the dad in the quote simply wants to be able to choose the right time and place, nope, nope, zip it! Let me refer you, first of all, back to the "DON'T WATCH THE SHOW!" golden rule, but also remind you that people with disabilities exist on subways and in stores and in the schools that his children attend and generally out in the world all over the place. Is he going to ask them to hide themselves from his kids as well? "Well, yes, sir, it's true that I have no legs and therefore ride the subway because it's just a wee bit easier than driving a car, but I feel so gosh darn sorry for YOU and YOUR dilemma that I'll just try to make sure I take the 9:06 instead of the 9:12 in the future, how's that?"

The bottom line, though, is really just this: what is so difficult about talking to your kids about disabilities? About sex? About the fact that there are bad people in the world? Why is it that parents seem to feel the best thing for their children is to pretend these things don't exist -- sometimes indefinitely, or sometimes to the point of expecting the kids' schools to take care of those nasty little issues for them -- rather than just sitting and having a normal conversation? What are they afraid could go wrong? Are they afraid that they might not explain everything exactly perfectly and that the kid might not grasp the concept entirely?

For Pete's sake, so what? Believe me, I'm a teacher, I'm familiar with the idea of a kid not grasping a concept entirely. Guess what? They live. And you have a chance to answer their questions and explain again the next day.

Since both my sister and I are the product of artificial insemination by anonymous donor, I'm familiar with being on the child's side of a concept that is truly difficult for a child to grasp. One of the few things my parents managed to be smart about during my upbringing was attempting to explain this to me from the very beginning. Guess what? I didn't quite get it right away. I thought I was a robot, actually, that was the interpretation I ended up with. (This is partially because my parents barely seemed to understand the science behind the whole thing themselves, quite frankly, but I digress.) But guess what? I was all like, "AWESOME, I'm a robot. I ROCK." I somehow survived until the next attempt at explaining and the next attempt, and eventually I understood what it was all about. I was admittedly a little bit bummed over not being a robot anymore, but dude, it was fun while it lasted.

No, I have another theory. I think that the reason parents don't like broaching so-called difficult subjects with their children is because they're embarrassed about it, and in two -- no, wait, maybe three -- different ways. The first is that they're simply too prudish to talk about sex or disabilities or mean nasty people without blushing. The second is that they're afraid their kids are going to go to pre-school or wherever and says "MY DADDY HAS A PENIS AND MY MOMMY HAS A VAGINA!" (the problem therefore ACTUALLY being too much of a wuss to talk to other PARENTS about difficult subjects). The third is that they might even feel that their own knowledge on the topic is lacking enough that they wouldn't be able to explain it to someone else.

My answers to that? Suck it up, suck it up, and blame your own parents for a vicious cycle.

Mother Tongue

2009-02-27T12:36:00.006+01:00

Today, my last day at work before going on maternity leave (yay!), I went out to lunch with 3 girls from work -- two that I work with now, and my former boss who is currently still on maternity leave with her second child. Since all three of them have small children in the daycare age, children and daycare and school and such things were a natural topic of conversation.

Part of the conversation ended up being about language, as we discussed my former boss's interest in sending her children to the International English School in Linköping, and our intention to have our kids start in daycare and Swedish school as early as possible since we speak English at home. I was inspired to write by the fact that another of my co-lunching co-workers had a hard time understanding why we intend to speak English at home with our child -- not just me, but even Fredrik.

The concept of a native language, or a mother tongue, is typically defined in a far too narrow way, in my opinion. What would you say the definition of "native language" is? Or "mother tongue"? Are they even the same thing? Is it whatever language you learned first? Is it the language you speak most often? Is it the one that you're "best at" -- and what does that mean? The most important question is: does one communicate best in one's native language? I contend that the definition ought to be the other way around -- the language in which one communicates best should be the definition of "mother tongue," and contrary to the typical definition of these concepts, a person can have more than one. That which determines what a person's mother tongue is is highly dependent upon the situation. A person's mother tongue can change throughout their lifetime, or even throughout the day.

Fredrik was born in Sweden of Swedish parents, and the first language he learned was Swedish. He started learning English at a young age, a phenomenon that is simply unavoidable in this country, even if you try to cover your eyes and ears. But he played video games in English and was most likely exposed to a bit more of the world at an earlier age than other people might be, and this, coupled with a natural gift for languages, made him the type of person who could correct his English teachers in school. He knew the words, he knew the grammar, and he could read and write fluently. But of course, no one would call English his native language or mother tongue just because of that -- so ABILITY and correctness in a language is clearly not the deciding factor.

I was born in America of American parents, and spoke no other language but English for the first 24 years of my life. I studied a bit of French in high school and took my language requirement in ancient Greek at St. Olaf, but I was never able to have more than the very simplest of 5-minute conversations in French, and given that I never met a 2500-year old Greek, those skills were nothing to brag about, either. There is no controversy in claiming that English was definitely the only contender for Lori's native language.

But then something happened in the year 2000. Fredrik started calling me on the phone. Within a few minutes, his somewhat clumsy accent gave way to a less nervous, more fluent and phonetically correct English. Within a couple of phone calls, he spoke well enough that one could accurately say that he spoke American English and not British English (most Swedes cannot claim to speak either, since the distinction requires a level of consistency with relatively subtle differences that is simply too difficult to achieve for a speaker with little practice). But this also shows that formal correctness with a language is not what makes you native or even fluent -- the words and the grammar were clearly in his head, dormant enough to require -- and simultaneously good enough to make sufficient -- a short warm-up period.

In 2001 we became a couple and started spending gobs of money and time and plane tickets. In 2002 I moved here. In 2003 I started studying an intense course in Swedish, and by the time 2004 began I spoke fluently. Despite my need to learn Swedish in order to become a productive member of society, we have always spoken exclusively English to each other at home. We tried a few times to speak Swedish in order to help me learn, but it just didn't work. We became angry with each other, we misunderstood each other, we felt strange and foreign and not like ourselves. This is despite the fact that I spoke the language fluently, and Fredrik had spoken it since he took his first steps. We made a discovery: a relationship can have a mother tongue. The mother tongue of our relationship was clearly English, and we were suddenly transported into some other strange, unfamiliar, uncomfortable relationship when we tried to speak Swedish.

We discovered something else: people have opinions about these things, and they're not afraid to butt their noses into other people's business. (Just as a side note and a clarification: I do NOT mean that my co-worker was irritating or nosy today; just want to make that clear.) Despite the fact that I was the best student in my Swedish class, became fluent in everyday situations after a few months and was more than ready for the Swedish world by the time the course was over, people still wondered why we didn't speak Swedish at home. They insisted on grounds such as "Lori would learn faster" or "It just doesn't make sense since you live in Sweden" and god knows what else. There are people who STILL don't understand that we can speak English at home and protest that this can affect my ability to "learn the language" -- and yet these people seem to agree that I speak Swedish so well and without an accent that they didn't even know I wasn't Swedish until someone said so. Most people understand when we explain that we were together for three years before I was able to have a simple conversation in Swedish and that our relationship is very dependent upon the ability to express ourselves on a very high and academic level, and that by the time I was able to express myself on that level in Swedish, there was little point in shaking things up at home. Those that don't understand that explanation usually get it after the following example: if a Swedish couple moves to America, do we really expect them to start speaking English at home just because of geography? No, of course not.

So now that we've established the concept of our relationship having English as its mother tongue, what about Fredrik? He went from being a normal Swede -- a person who speaks Swedish almost exclusively, even if Swedes are exposed to a good deal of English on a daily basis -- to being a person who spoke only English at home (and sometimes Swedish, sometimes English at work, as he started working quite a bit with Asian customers). Is it really possible that this drastic change does not affect a person's "mother tongue"? Again, I think most people see mother tongue or native language as something that gets cemented during your childhood, but I contend that that is simply not the case.

Ask yourself how many times Fredrik has said "I love you." Now ask yourself how many times he has said "Jag älskar dig." Unless his relationship with his co-workers is a lot more sensitive than I've imagined, his quotient of "I love you" to "Jag älskar dig" is astronomical after 8 years of having English as his household language. This goes for almost any expression of feelings, emotions, or vulnerability. It certainly extends into other areas as well -- topics such as household chores, cats, politics, pregnancy, etc. are to varying degrees more often discussed in our household than they probably are at Fredrik's workplace. There are several possible consequences of this. One is that he might be just as good at talking about such a topic in English as he is in Swedish. Another possibility is that he's just as BAD at speaking about the topic in both languages -- there can be quite a bit of interference when there's a 50/50 shot of coming up with the right word in your head at the right time. And the other possibility is, of course, that he is better able to discuss such a topic in English, since it is more often discussed at home than it is at work.

The same phenomenon applies to me. I speak Swedish at my place of work, so my fluency in work-related conversations is much better if the conversation is conducted in Swedish. A few weeks ago I had to help a guy from our Stockholm office solve a problem with a test run. He's originally from Scotland, and has been in Sweden for 4 years or so. But it simply wasn't an option for us to speak English to each other while trying to solve the problem. We're both fluent enough in Swedish and so used to using it when talking about telephone hardware and builds and fixtures and test software and everything else that goes into our job that speaking English simply slowed us down; we lost too much time having to translate in our heads. And then there are certain topics that I never encountered before moving to Sweden, so my ability to talk about them in English is next to zero. I still have a hard time translating the word "besiktning" in a way that satisfies me. But that's because I never bought a brand new house in the U.S., nor do we have to get our cars inspected every year in the rigorous manner that is required in Sweden. I got my teaching degree in Sweden, so certain pedagogical concepts -- especially the ones that are related to Swedish school laws and procedures -- just do not have translations in the readily available part of my brain's storage. Hell, they might not even have translations in the dusty, locked-away parts, either -- what is "läroplan" in English? That's practically an unanswerable question; it is one thing in England and another in Ireland and a most likely non-existent or state-by-state thing in the U.S., none of which I know the word for because I was not trained to be a teacher in any of those places.

So what is my native language? What is Fredrik's mother tongue? Does it really make sense to say that Lori's mother tongue is English, period, end of discussion, if there are situations in which I struggle to speak English and throw in a bunch of Swedish words because, when it comes right down to it, my thoughts are in Swedish when I'm in those situations? Is Fredrik's native language Swedish simply because that's the one he learned first, even if there are certain areas in which he has participated in countless discussions in English and perhaps never discussed the topic in Swedish, and would therefore surely find himself having a good deal of difficulty doing so if the occasion ever arose?

This brings us, then, to the new bit that people are having difficulty understanding. We've decided that our kid needs to start in daycare as soon as they are allowed -- 12 months -- so that they can start learning Swedish as soon as possible. By this we mean that we intend to continue speaking only English at home, even with our kid. And people don't quite get this -- and, in fact, some people get downright upset about it.

Yes, it is true that many international couples like us follow the pattern where the Swedish parent speaks Swedish with the kids, the non-Swedish parent speaks the non-Swedish language with the kids, and the parents continue speaking to each other in whatever language they always have (alternatively they speak their own "native languages" even when having a conversation with each other, so that the kids consistently hear the same language come out of the parents' mouths). People seem to think that it would make more sense for us to do this -- I speak English and Fredrik speaks Swedish. But I'm telling you, I simply don't believe it would work. These people insist that we can continue speaking English to each other, but seriously -- it's a situation that I simply cannot imagine, even if I understand that it can work really well for other people.

The first reason is that communication on a very high level is simply too important in our little Paulsson-Ceangailte family. I find it hard to see myself being comfortable with my husband speaking one language to me and a different language to my child. In my mind, that situation would throw up invisible barriers between us and even give me a sense of some kind of bizarre tear in the space-time continuum whenever the three of us were in the room together. It would, for me, create a sitaution in which the relationships husband-wife, mom-kid and dad-kid exist, but where the full harmony of mom-dad-kid could never be complete. The lunch companion who is my former boss -- who, by the way, is German, so this issue is very real for her as well -- was very insightful when she compared these feelings to the fact that some families think it's very important to have the same last name or any other kind of "solidarity" that perhaps another family doesn't think is so important. For me, everyone speaking the same language -- no matter how TECHNICALLY excellent we all are at both English and Swedish -- is a necessary kind of solidarity.

The second reason -- or arguably, a deeper explanation of the first -- is that I believe English is Fredrik's "family situation" mother tongue. Yes, I can fully understand why it seems odd to my other lunch companion that Fredrik would speak English to our child even when I wasn't around. And I can't swear on my life that he will, I can't know how it will be until the kid is here. But my feeling is that it is far less natural for Fredrik to speak Swedish to our child than my co-worker imagines. In her mind, Swedish is Fredrik's mother tongue, and the assumption is that it is always more natural for him to communicate in that language. I contend that life just isn't that simple.

However, since my co-worker is a nice and reasonable person, I must point out again that I didn't feel she was butting in at all, and she very much so understood my point of view after I explained it this way: if it's more natural for Fredrik to say "I love you" than it is for him to say "Jag älskar dig," then that right there is exactly why I hope he chooses English when speaking to our child. Language exists so that we can communicate with each other, and real communication is not about technical and grammatical correctness but rather about expression of thoughts and feelings that feels natural both to the speaker/projector and to the receiver. (This is why there isn't one universal sign language in the world and why useful, practical, expressive forms of sign language are ones that have not been forced into a correlation with the surrounding written and spoken language.) Yes, I definitely want my kid to be as much of a word smith as Mom and Dad are, but the fairly natural assumption of "the kid will learn Swedish better if Fredrik speaks Swedish with it" becomes more suspect if we assert that even Fredrik expresses himself better in English than in Swedish in certain situations. And when we really consider the language development aspect, we realize that we're talking about a child who probably won't have babbled more than a word or two before being immersed in a Swedish-speaking environment, and that the few months of delay before our children start talking (which tends to be true even for the bilingual-from-birth children) will quickly be vastly eclipsed by the excellent language skills our children will undoubtedly have because of being raised by parents who value reading, education, curiosity, language skills, communication -- and having a Mom that's a certified teacher to boot. Seriously, our family is the type that the Swedish socialist bloc is bitching about when they complain about how unfair life and school are for kids who DON'T have parents like us.

Whatever Fredrik decides, or whatever comes to him most naturally, at the end of the day I put much more value in our kid feeling and hearing genuinely and naturally expressed emotion and humor from Dad than in having a few months' head start on the Swedish language.

Fecundity

2009-02-03T09:34:00.005+01:00

A friend of mine gets on my case whenever I haven't blogged for a while. I tell him that I haven't been seriously annoyed and sitting in front of a computer simultaneously for a while now, so he'll have to deal.

A lot of the not sitting in front of a computer has to do with me having "symphus pubus disorder," which means I have an unusual amount of pain associated with the loosening and widening of my pelvic bone that occurs in every pregnancy to prepare for the birth. The Swedish term "foglossning," which basically means "coming apart at the seams," is a much more telling description of what is physically happening (the "seams" in the pelvis are softening and widening, so the two halves move much more independently than normal) and of how much it hurts.

Anyway, this means that sitting (or standing, or walking, or going from sitting to standing, or getting into or out of bed, or turning over in bed, or... well, everything but sleeping) makes me hurt more. My computer has mostly been sitting at the end of the bed and being used to watch episodes of Scrubs.

Yesterday I managed to get my midwife to confirm that many people who experience foglossning still have it even after the baby is born. Oh, and that it gets worse with every pregnancy.

JOY.

So my goal is to be so rich by the next time I'm pregnant that I can take much more time off before the baby comes and just lie around with my feet propped up. Or rather, let's be honest, the goal is for FREDRIK to be rich enough by that time. I always thought that I was smart enough to end up rich some day, and I've come to terms with the fact that that smartness involved marrying someone even smarter and with much more applicable talent.

My talent appears to be in the baby-making category. Okay, we'll ignore the fact that the last attempt didn't go so well. On this attempt, I got knocked up on the second try, for starters, and I'm currently passing all the midwife's tests with flying colors. My hemoglobin is up (despite not taking daily iron supplements), my blood sugar is stable, my blood pressure is low and there's no "egg white" in my urine (that just sounds so weird, doesn't it?), my symphus fundus measurement is spot on (read: I'm as fat as I'm supposed to be), and this kid is already head-down and engaging. Locked and loaded! There are other things that are working as intended as well, but quite frankly, I'm not sure I know you well enough to discuss them with you. And yes, indeed, I take credit for it all! I'm sure it's all because I'm super awesome and have done everything right.

Okay, so I will blog again soon, I hope. Don't fret. The post will probably be about Republicans saying stupid things about Guantanamo, or Mona Sahlin saying stupid things about taxes, or maybe a recipe for lime pie.

Freedom from Religion

2009-01-21T14:39:00.008+01:00

Right when Fredrik is in the middle of a discussion with me and on Richard Dawkins' website about why America ended up so religious compared to the many very secular countries in Europe (you can find some of this discussion here), it seems that the Swedish government has today put forth a motion to make marriage gender-neutral in Sweden -- that is, to allow same-sex couples to marry.

For those of you who don't know: in Sweden a same-sex couple can currently have a "registered partnership". Entering a registered partnership is quick and painless -- it doesn't involve any more paperwork than getting married, for sure -- and two registered partners have the exact same legal rights and obligations as a married couple, save one: the default parenthood of one partner if the other partner has a baby. That is, when our baby is born, Fredrik will automatically be registered as its father, because we are married and our marriage means, among other things, that he is presumed to take father-type responsibility for any baby that I give birth to (without any illusion or give-a-damn about whether or not he is actually the biological father). If we were NOT married, which is the case for the parents of over 50% of the children born in Sweden today, we'd have to go down to Socialen and both of us swear that he's the baby daddy -- again, without any actual paternity test or anything. It's just a matter of taking responsibility for the baby, and a married man is seen to have done that in automatically and in advance when he said "I do". Homosexual couples in a registered partnership are put in the same category as "sambos" (couples who just live together, who also basically have the same rights as married couples, by the way) in this respect; in the case that one of them gives birth or adopts a child, the other has to take 5 extra minutes to fill out a little paperwork in order to become the child's other parent. As you can tell, I don't see this as a terrible inconvenience, even if my friends that have had "love children" think the process is a wee bit embarrassing.

The other point to be made before dissecting an article on the subject is that I think same-sex couples should be able to be married and that all such domestic/family partnerships should be entirely gender-neutral -- and neutral in a lot of other ways, really -- so while I think the difference between marriage and registered partnership is paltry and inconsequential, I see no need for there to be a difference and understand the feeling of inequality that looms in the air as long as the difference exists.

So when I saw a quote on DN.se today from Göran Hägglund, leader of the Christian Democrat party in Sweden, I became a little perplexed. Ponderous, if you will.

See, the majority and Government in Sweden right now is a "conservative" one, or moderate or liberal or whatever combination of "we're not socialists" is your favorite label. The Christian Democrats are a part of this majority and Government, along with 3 other parties. But while the motion to make marriage gender-neutral is being put forth by the Government, the Christian Democrats (which I will call KD) are not a part of the motion. They don't like this gender-neutral marriage business -- and since they're called the Christian Democrats, it doesn't require a long explanation as to why.

What might surprise you, on the other hand, is that I voted for them in the last election. So you can imagine that I'm a big vexed and kerfuffled over the fact that they're dissenting from the rest of the government on this question. And the quote from Göran Hägglund that vexed and kerfuffled me was that this motion is a "threat to religious freedom."

Wha... uhh?

See, I was not 100% shocked that they didn't want to be a part of making same-sex marriage legal in Sweden, even if I was a bit sad that a party that I liked quite a lot was actively differing from my own opinions (some of them passively differ from my opinions about abortion, in the sense that the pro-lifers in Sweden tend to be members of KD but even they know that they'd be wasting their breath). But when I saw this quote I thought... no, Göran, honey, you're not going to go down that road, are you? Please tell me that "Think of the CHILDREN!" isn't going to be mentioned in the accompanying article anywhere?

Luckily, I didn't end up disappointed at all. The article explaining Hägglund's and KD's view, which you can read here, does not go down the "Think of the CHILDREN!" road at all. Rather, they suggest that making marriage gender-neutral while simultaneously making no change to who is allowed to perform marriages will most likely put people -- churches and mosques, specifically -- in the position of being forced to perform marriages that violate their religious beliefs. While allowing churches and other religious institutions to continue to decide who they are willing to marry is an idea you can dabble with for a little while, it doesn't take long to see that that is not a good solution (if you don't believe me, think of the business of pharmacists being allowed to refuse to dispense birth control pills in the U.S...). So KD's suggestion is that marriage become a 100% civil/secular contract and the right to join people into their civil/secular contract be completely taken away from religious institutions.

This is, in my opinion, perfectly spot-on.

It makes more sense. A marriage in the church has no reason to have anything to do with being entitled to half of a house or right to visit a person in the hospital or change which cable channels you get even if the account is in the other person's name. A civil marriage has nothing to do with loving and cherishing the other person and promising to do so until you die, so help you "some fictional character" (as Magnus Betnér has apparently put it). A common argument from anti-gay-marriage activists is that man-woman marriage is "tradition"; that it's "always been that way" -- well, then we're only working harder to preserve the tradition by making a church wedding nothing more than an exchange of words and a promise to God, as that's what it was from the beginning before all of this legal business came in much later.

It preserves religious freedom entirely -- no, strengthens it, I'd say. It would sever unnecessary ties between church and state, and a church wedding would be "voluntary" to a much greater degree than it is now. I find this not only a benefit to the churches and mosques -- who I whole-heartedly believe should be able to reject performing same-sex marriages if it violates their religious principles -- but it addresses a pet peeve of mine: it would mean that far less non-religious people would get married in churches. Let's face it, the vast majority of people get married for the legal and civil benefits, and the fact that many of them do it in a church -- despite it being practically the only time they set foot in a church in their lives -- is because it's traditional and/or convenient and/or pretty. But if the church no longer had the right to perform the legal side of the union, this vast majority of people who are seeking just that would have to actively choose to "add on" the churchy part, and I rejoice in the idea that they would not make that choice. This brings us back to Fredrik's discussion about why America is religious and Sweden is secular (de facto, when the de juro situation is quite the opposite in many respects), as it just bothers the living fuck out of me as an "it's the principle of the thing!" American atheist that people go around having church weddings and baptisms despite their non-belief just because it's a pretty building or because "everybody else does it" or because it means their kid gets presents.

It would even help make it so that marriage could have a more flexible definition in other aspects, aside from the question of same or opposite gender. Have you all seen the movie I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry? Two straight guys enter a registered partnership so that the kids of the one guy, who is injured and unemployed, can benefit from the health and life insurance of the other guy, who gets said benefits from his job and can transfer them to his family. The climax of the movie revolves around them having to prove that they're in love and actually have sex, etc., because of suspicions that they're "defrauding" the city and/or the insurance companies with their partnership. But why should this be fraud? If two friends are close enough so that one wants to help raise the other's children and make sure they are provided for, should sex be a prerequisite for whether or not they're allowed to enter into such a union, contract, or agreement? But wait, I haven't said what genders they are -- what if one is a man and one is a woman? Then no one would question it -- hell, if sex were a pre-requisite for being allowed to be married, half of all married couples with children would be going through some sort of forced divorce right now (and wouldn't THAT be in line with society's goals!). But what if it's two men? See -- why does that make a difference? But now I'm either preaching to the choir or to the deaf, so perhaps I'd best move on.

I see a few comments after the article claiming that KD's suggestion is "impossible to implement." I don't for the life of me see why not -- especially since a full seperation of the religious and the legal side of weddings has been in place for years in many other European countries.

Another comment at the end of the article shows a typical lack of understanding for what discrimination and freedom of speech, among other legal and philosophical concepts, actually mean. *"I would like to see KD's proposal go through, but their reasoning doesn't hold," the commenter writes, my translation. "We have freedom of religion, yes, but it doesn't mean that I can do whatever I want in religion's name. If I believe that my gods are pleased if I sacrifice children or circumsize women, I still can't do it, though I can believe it. Neither can a priest say whatever they want just because of religion." This person's understanding of freedom of religion (as well as freedom of speech, and the concept of discrimination) is no more mature or better developed than the adversary I imagined in the beginning of my post -- the super-fundamentalist Christian who claims that homosexual marriage (or indeed, even allowing homosexuality at all) infringes on their freedom of religion simply because they can't raise their children (OMG Think of the CHILDREN!) in a society that is queer-free. Refusing to perform a purely religious ceremony (as it would be according to the proposal) that would violate the religion itself is not discrimination, nor can it be classed in the same category of "secular morals trump religious ones" as forbidding human sacrifice or female circumcision. Otherwise, you'd have to believe that it's discriminatory for a Christian priest to refuse to perform a female circumcision or a marriage between an old man and a 10-year old girl -- but then you'd be contradicting yourself, no? Plus, the statement that a priest can't say whatever he wants and refer to his religion for protection is, in my opinion, simply false. We're treading dangerously into the territory of confusing civil rights with the right not to have our precious little feelings hurt.

Marriage was, from its very beginnings, a religious institution. One which people make a promise to god and in front of their families -- and, if I'm permitted a side note, was most often polygamous and non-voluntary in its origins (so spare me the drivel about "traditional marriage"). For the sake of the society we live in today, the blending of this religious tradition with a legal one -- shared property, rights and responsibilities as supported by a legal system -- by using the same name for it can be seen as a regrettable mistake. Allowing the same people to seal both contracts was an even bigger mistake, or at the very least something that ought to get thrown out the window in a democratic society in which citizens are supposedly able to enjoy freedom from establishment and freedom to practice.

So it's cool to see that I'm in full agreement with Göran. Though I don't know... can my "it's the principle of the thing!" American atheist heart continue to allow me to vote for the CHRISTIAN democrats? That's a toughy.

*"Jag skulle gärna se KDs förslag av andra skäl, men KDs resonemang håller inte. Vi har religionsfrihet ja, men det betyder inte att man får göra vad som helst i religionens namn. Om jag tror att mina gudar blidkas av att offra barn eller omskära flickor, så får jag inte göra det (men tro det). Inte heller får man som präst säga vad som helst med hänvisning till religionen."

Free at Last

2009-01-21T07:09:00.002+01:00

Does anyone else have the urge to dance around and sing "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead"?

2009-01-20T15:00:00.003+01:00

Elvis's favorite sandwich was fried peanut butter and banana. Coincidence? I think not.

Peanut Butter: The Atheist's Nightmare

Bananas: The Homopho... er, Atheist's Nightmare

Fredrik says, "What I want to know is why god didn't make the peanuts into peanut butter straight away. And why he didn't make at least one of our digits a spoon to eat it with."

Now now. You can't expect the omnipotent designer to have thought of everything.

Humanity

2009-01-19T16:38:00.002+01:00

More Poll Smoking on MLK Day

2009-01-19T16:12:00.007+01:00

An interesting article about a poll conducted by CNN regarding people's views on race relations in the U.S.: Most blacks say MLK's vision fulfilled, poll finds.

What's most interesting is the seeming contradictions in the poll's findings. First, the fact that blacks are apparently much more content than whites in regards to the current condition of race relations in the U.S. (69% of blacks and 46% of whites saying MLKing's dream has been realized) makes me wonder what thought processes members of the two different groups used. A concept like "race relations" can be very broad indeed, and perhaps the black respondents were thinking about entirely different aspects than the white respondents. One possibility, however likely or unlikely, is that the white respondents genuinely realize how far there still is to go in a way that the black respondents don't. Another possibility is that it's a form of "well-meaning hippy disease," where the whites don't realize how condescending and patronizing their well-meaning is ("They have such beautiful children!" says Larry Wilmore). Then you also have the very likely possibility that the blacks were thinking "Yeah, I feel I can be an equal, contributing, respected member of society" whereas the whites were thinking "They're all criminals and crackheads!" The irony being, anyway, that the discrepancy itself suggests there are at least a few kinks left in the area of race "relations".

Then you have the fact that, even though more than half of whites say MLK's dream hasn't been fulfilled, half of them answered that the Voting Rights Act was no longer necessary. So apparently ability to exercise the right to vote was not one of the areas where they felt race relations needed improving. (Sadly, that puts my "They're all criminals and crackheads!" theory in the lead.)

Also amazing is the fact that as late as March 2008 it was only 34% of blacks and 35% of whites that said MLK's dream had become a reality. I guess we can all guess what event of the last 10 months triggered this doubling. But the article goes on to state that a majority of blacks no do NOT believe that Obama's presidency will trigger a new era in race relations and that, in contrast to how they felt right after the election, the majority believed that race will always be an issue in America. A similar drop in whites' enthusiasm was noticed, it says. So race is and always will be a problem, even though we live in a nation where MLK's four children are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character?

I want them to do a new poll, but this time I demand answers in the form of a 1000-2000 word persuasive essay.

Logical Fallacy

2009-01-09T14:40:00.009+01:00

Here's a phrase that I'm sick of:

Women have had babies for thousands of years/hundreds of years ago/when I was pregnant I did/didn't/women did plenty of/never did X or Y, and they survived/their babies survived/the human race survived.

Yes, you're correct, the ancient Egyptians had babies, too. And they also probably drank beer and smoked whatever ancient Egyptians smoked and didn't read What to Expect when you're Expecting and didn't use pain killers or iron supplements or avoid blue cheese.

They were also most likely years younger on average when giving birth than we are, and rather than being some sort of magical super-race devoid of miscarriages and birth defects as the argument would suggest, I'm guessing their infant, child and mother mortality rates as well as their rates of physical and mental birth defects were a lot higher and their average life expectancy a lot lower. So, since my personal goal in life is actually not to be a part of making sure that the human race continues to survive and evolve but rather to make sure my OWN kid and I both survive and remain healthy, I am in no hurry to emulate the ancient Egyptians' or any other wistfully remembered past culture's gestational methods just so that I can have more fun -- scratch that, just so that YOU can have more fun -- at a party.

So the fact that certain or all people X number of years ago did not act in the same way while pregnant as we do today is wholly uninteresting because of the fact that they didn't get the same outcome as we get today. Next time someone uses this argument on me to try to get me to drink a glass of wine, I'll pick at them for their silly modern habit of showering and brushing their teeth and cooking their meat before they eat it. After all, cavemen didn't do those things, and things obviously worked out fine for them.

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

2008-12-28T12:48:00.006+01:00

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

2008-12-21T17:30:00.013+01:00

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

2008-12-15T17:51:00.006+01:00

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

2008-12-15T16:10:00.004+01:00

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

2008-12-15T11:08:00.006+01:00

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:

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

2008-12-12T19:17:00.008+01:00

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?

2008-12-11T08:33:00.002+01:00

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

2008-11-27T18:51:00.005+01:00

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

2008-11-22T18:47:00.003+01:00

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:

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.

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!

2008-11-21T13:56:00.002+01:00

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

2008-11-21T04:33:00.003+01:00

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

2008-11-19T20:47:00.009+01:00

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

2008-11-15T15:47:00.004+01:00

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

2008-11-13T21:20:00.006+01:00

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

2008-11-12T22:15:00.004+01:00

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?

2008-10-30T12:14:00.004+01:00

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

2008-10-28T15:09:00.007+01:00

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

2008-10-28T10:55:00.006+01:00

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?

2008-10-18T09:16:00.008+02:00

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...

Incompetence, part what?

2008-10-04T16:32:00.003+02:00

For a moment there, I was afraid it was over. My tension-filled tête a tête with Försäkringskassan over my sick leave after the miscarriage.

Since the last time I wrote about it, they've managed to idiot themselves at least once more. After contacting them once yet another month had gone without me hearing anything, I got the impression that they sped up my registration before answering that the registration was now finished. I went in and ordered my European medical insurance card on their website and, sure enough, this time it said "Thanks for your order, you will receive your card within 10 days" instead of saying "Who the hell are you?" But I was not to be disappointed, as I soon after received forms in the mail asking me to describe when and why I was away from work and what my symptoms were.

I was a bit confused about receiving these forms, as they asked for the exact same information that they'd already received on my doctor's notes -- and I knew they must have received the doctor's notes, because none of this process ever would have started otherwise -- so I went and had a little chat with the HR lady at my work about it. She mentioned that they had called her just the day before and wanted to confirm that they had the right dates, and had in fact even said that they still had my doctor's notes on file. So everything sounded good. I filled in the forms with the unnecessary repeat info and sent them in.

Two weeks later I received a letter saying: "We see that you have requested sick leave for the period 4 June to 7 August. In order for us to process this request, we must receive doctor's notes covering that time period."

Grr, grr, and more grr.

So I contacted Försäkringskassan, told them they didn't know their elbow from their asses, asked our HR lady to re-send my doctor's notes, and settled in for what I assumed would be another month of arguing with them or hearing that they'd lost this paper or given me the wrong address for that paper and that they'd gotten my file mixed up with a refugee from Zimbabwe.

But then, suddenly, as I looked up our bank account today, I got a shock.

There it is. My sick-leave money. Directly deposited.

But wait, there's more -- as far as I can tell, it's the right amount.

Suddenly, everything felt very empty. What will I now spend all of my free time with? I tried to console myself by remembering that in a few months I'll be hitting them up for maternity leave money and that they'll surely screw that up as well, but it just didn't fill the hole that had suddenly been created in my psyche and daily activity schedule.

But there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I discovered on Friday that my employer owes me money! After staring at my last two paychecks for god knows how long and wondering what it was that just didn't add up, I realized that they'd messed up on my sick leave as well. Despite the fact that I worked 50% for 6 weeks and then 75% for 3 weeks after that, they had charged me for being 100% sick on the weekends. So not right.

Ahhh, yes. The comforting feeling of once again knowing that I'm surrounded by people who don't know what they're doing. Back to my warm fuzzy self!

Kotte

2008-09-18T10:47:00.004+02:00

So when I started this blog I said that I planned on writing about food and catharting over my miscarriage. I haven't done that much of either, have I? The explanation for both is simple: I'm pregnant again.

Catharting over my miscarriage is difficult when all of the fears and memories and grief are now fully tied to something that I'm trying not to mention here.

Writing about food and how fun it is to cook and posting recipes is difficult when most proper food makes me nauseastedly wrinkle my nose and the smell of cooking drives me to buy take-out or let Fredrik cook for me.

Telling people you're pregnant

Before I was about 25 and started working, which is the first time I had people around me who were making babies, I wasn't aware that people typically waited until after the first trimester to tell people they were pregnant. Perhaps this isn't the way people do things in the states -- I really wouldn't know, as I believe I knew a grand total of 1 pregnant person before I moved to Sweden, and she was ready to pop when I met her -- because I remember that my English friend and I were really surprised at how low-key and late a fellow teacher announced that she had a baby on the way. But it wasn't until my friend Maria became pregnant with her beautiful little girl in 2004 that I became at all "up close and personal" with this whole having-babies business, so I read up a little and learned that miscarriages are common and that the vast majority occur within the firs 12 weeks. Since the first ultrasound (at least around here) is also at 12 weeks, waiting until after this is considered advisable. You wouldn't want to have to tell people "false alarm!" would you?

For a person who has previously had a miscarriage, the advice to wait before telling people is typically given in an even stronger tone. This normally doesn't change anything, of course, since most people receiving this advice pass the week of their previous miscarriage before they pass week 12 and the first ultrasound. I think the peak weeks for miscarriage are week 5 (chemical miscarriages) and week 8 (I don't know why this one is, but presumably it's because the common genetic flukes that cause miscarriages allow an embryo to last for about this long). The advice to be cautious and wait with the news is perhaps a bit more for those of us who have had second-trimester miscarriages; the people who have had the unthinkable 3% of 20% event happen to them and, in the eyes of the advice givers, probably wouldn't want to go through telling everyone and their aunt once again that their baby has died.

This advice is a load of crap.

Since we lost our baby in week 17, everyone knew I was pregnant. My hairdresser knew I was pregnant. My driving instructor knew I was pregnant. Fredrik had gone around and proudly announced it to all the out-of-towners who came to an anniversary party for his university band. One of the first thoughts I had when waking up at the hospital (or possibly even before) was how we were going to survive having to tell this story 300 times.

We made it as easy on ourselves as we could, trying to pick out central people in each circle of friends or acquaintences and asking them to spread the news. They performed their task admirably. This meant that almost everyone knew right away, and the awkward "So, when's the big day!" were brought to a minimum and, since they were from people we don't see very often, were saved for a time when we were better equipped to cope with the question. Even discussing it with our closer friends and loved ones became spread-out in a way that didn't overwhelm us; it was vital for me to know that people knew, to know that they understood why I was as quiet and panicked-looking and weepy as I was, and that when to discuss it in detail was mostly up to me.

But the question is, did the dilemma of how to tell 300 people that I'd lost my baby without going positively looney warrant us trying to prevent a repeat? What is the alternative, and is it better?

The alternative is to hide the news entirely. The first problem with that is the fear. How on earth could I deal with the constant fear and worry about how this pregnancy will turn out if I don't allow myself to talk to anyone about it? The second problem is joy. I want to be able to be happy about being pregnant, even if I can't bring myself to be happy in the same way as the blissfully naive girls who start buying booties and picking out names as soon as they get a positive pregnancy test. It doesn't seem fair that my previous loss should rob even these things from me.

The next problem is deciding when to tell people. You have to cough up the information eventually, since otherwise your belly will tell people for you. But after having a late miscarriage, there is no logical deadline. Since I miscarried in wee 17, should I just wait until week 18? That's pretty artificial, and doesn't guarantee anything, especially when most of us don't know the cause of our miscarriages. Should I wait until week 20, when the window for miscarriage technically ends? That's also pretty random, as it's merely a definition decided by doctors and legislators, that week 20 is where miscarriage ends and stillbirth begins. If I can lose a baby in week 17, I can lose one in week 21. And by this time, people would be wondering why I'm wearing the same pair of fat-tummy overalls every day.

How do you explain to your boss why you're disappearing two afternoons a week if you don't say it's for midwife and counselor appointments? How do you deal with the tactless people who won't take no for an answer when they offer you wine? What do you do if you go to a friend's place for dinner and they serve three courses filled with stuff off the "don't eat when you're pregnant" list? Your friends have their eyes on you all the time, so as soon as you say no to a glass of chardonnay -- even if you're like me and would like to think that you don't drink that much normally -- they'll "know" that you're pregnant, anyway. Some of them will be so rude as to ask, and what's the point in lying?

And last but not least, we come to the point of this "wait to tell" advice: in case the unthinkable happens again, how do you tell all your friends and acquaintences and coworkers and hairdressers and driving instructors? My contention is: much more easily than the first time.

As soon as I've told people I'm pregnant this time, they knew what was at stake, in a way that didn't cross their minds last time. They are fully aware of the fact that I might lose this baby, too. Sadly this means that the reaction this time is more "Oh, cool, we'll cross our fingers" rather than "OOOH CONGRATULATIONS!" But let's be honest -- I'd want to choke some people if they were all jumping up and down and cooing and yelling excitedly this time. So everyone we care about knows what might happen, and knows quite vividly how much of a wreck I will be if it does. They're better equipped in many different ways to deal with the jiggling pile of Jell-o that I would become. The announcement would require several magnitudes less of explanation.

The alternative is to try to hide my cautious happiness, bottle up my near-crippling fear and worry, lie to my boss and look unprofessional, lose any chance left of bonding with my newly-mommied friends, and be forced to announce BOTH a pregnancy and a miscarriage simultaneously in case the worst happens, thereby denying myself the full support and understanding that I need from my loved ones.

I am now 12 weeks pregnant, and these weeks have gone agonizingly slowly. Every thought I have revolves around the pregnancy. I honestly can't imagine how much more torturous they would have been if I hadn't allowed myself to talk to my friends and family about it. So I can't for the life of me understand why I didn't let myself write about it.

Rhetorical

2008-09-12T22:12:00.004+02:00

At first, I imagined the conversation went something like this.

Sarah Palin, new mayor of Wasilla, Alaska: I want the following books banned.
Librarian at Wasilla library: No.
Palin: You're fired.

But according to Palin, the book-banning discussion was "rhetorical." An intellectual exercise. A meeting of minds. A testing of waters. Something more like this:

Palin: Let's say I asked you to ban these books. What would you say then?
Librarian: I'd say no.
Palin: You're fired.

Yes. Yes, I can see how that's much better.

Sick-sick-sick Incompetence, part cubed

2008-09-08T15:33:00.014+02:00

I am now registered with Försäkringskassan. It only took 3 months and me sending the form 3 times to the 3 different addresses given me by the 3+ people I talked to on the phone for them to essentially add 3 bits of information to their database: my name, my Swedish person number, and the fact that I'm a Swedish citizen. All information that they already know since they have access to the Swedish person register.

But don't fret, the epic isn't over -- all this means is that I am now able to start the process of demanding reimbursement for my part-time sick leave. Something that also apparently isn't as automatic as one would have thought -- despite the fact that my employer has reported when and how many hours per day I was sick, told them how much my salary is and sent copies of the required medical documents that prove that a doctor has decided that I am not fit to work full time. I received a form home in the mail (yes, yay, registration done, new forms to fill out!) asking me what illness prevented me from working, what the symptoms were, if I could have worked full time given different tasks or alternative means of transportation to work, etc. -- in other words, once again information that they already have, this time because all of that is covered thoroughly in the medical forms that they've already received. The end of the form contains a reminder for me to send these forms. I guess they want me to write "post traumatic stress symptoms after a late second trimester miscarriage" in triplicate?

The whole thing strikes me as very Catch 22. If I were as sick as I claim to be, how could I possibly have the presence of mind to fill in all these forms and go through all this bullshit?

What gets me the most is that they have to have all this information in order to decide if they will approve my sick leave or not. I find that bothersome because that means that some office workers will put themselves in the position of diagnosing me from afar based on some information on a paper instead of trusting what an actual doctor who has actually met me has written. I know for a fact that they don't think 2 months of sick leave is necessary for a miscarriage, especially given that mine didn't start until a month after the miscarriage occured. I've looked up their guidelines. But if it comes down to that, I will respectfully request that they stick it in their ear, since their guidelines only account for early miscarriages (and ones where one doesn't witness a nurse flush one's dead baby down a toilet).

In case you're wondering, my vitriol is enhanced by the fact that I saw the movie Sicko last night. The film basically told me how freakin' awesome health care is in all of Europe, and I sat screaming at the television that I beg to differ.

My opinions, I'll say right off, are colored by the fact that I was always excellently insured back home and was never critically ill or injured. However, I've spent lots of time with doctors in my life due to certain chronic illnesses and conditions, so I feel I have the right to compare many aspects of how one is met there versus here. I feel that the quality of the health care I received was hands-down better in the states than it is here. But the quality was not in question in the movie; as Moore puts it, it's not how satisfied a patient is that is the question but rather who gets to be a patient.

Something definitely needs to be done about access to quality health care in the U.S., but seriously -- it's not all that very peachy keen over here, either. The movie either proves that Sweden is alone in getting something pretty-often-wrong that France, Canada and the UK have gotten dazzlingly right, or the film is simply not very balanced and a piece of propaganda more than a documentary. Many of the problems described with insurance companies in the U.S. are very much alive here. A good example is the girl who needed two cochlear implants but the insurance company only wanted to pay for one. Östergötlands Landsting -- the people who decide over health care issues in my county -- came out a few years ago and said they would only allow such operations on one ear (or one knee, if both were broken!) because they were cutting costs. And to me, there's a difference to be seen in "what will our insurance company pay for" and "what proceedures will the hospital perform". I know that such costs are prohibitive to most families and that the insurance company denying payment is essentially the same thing as the hospital refusing to do the proceedure, but I personally feel there's a significant difference created by that word essentially. When both the cash and the hospital are run by the same people, in a culture of "if it works for one person, it works for everyone," the chances of being seen as an individual who needs care instead of as an expense virtually disappear.

I tend to be on Michael Moore's side (especially when his movies don't clearly take one side or the other, which I contend was the case in Bowling for Columbine), but there were so many stones left unturned in this piece. Most notedly, no rebuttal was offered for the claim that the NHS has outrageously long waiting lists for important proceedures, and none of the many people out there who I know are disgruntled with the NHS were spoken to, passed over in favor of talking to doctors and hospital staff about how they themselves rock and a man who claimed the NHS is as uncontroversial to Britons as women's suffrage. Furthermore, talking to a doctor about how much money he makes and how motivated he feels despite working for the government was, I feel, the wrong angle. In my opinion, if he wanted to get to the bottom of pay and incentive differences between socialized and non-socialized medical systems and the effects these have on quality, he should have interviewed a nurse.

He also uses his examples -- France, the UK, Canada -- to make sweeping generalizations about "the entire Western World." In the movie he claims that the U.S. is the only country in the Western World in which health care isn't universal and free. Not true -- health care is not free in Sweden. Nor can it be considered universal in the same sense as he claims in the film -- that a tourist who injures himself in Britain can waltz in and out of a hospital without paying -- since I know for a fact, having visited a doctor here when I was still "just visiting," that non-residents have to cough up the cash. He makes the same claim on his website, quoted by CNN: "In the rest of the Western world, everyone and anyone can be a patient because everyone is covered (And don't face exclusions for pre-existing conditions, co-pays, deductibles and costly monthly premiums)." Again, not true, as we have both deductibles and co-pays here. At today's exchange rate it costs me $16 to see a GP in Sweden and $40 to see the gynecologist.

This is all, of course, on top of the fact that CNN uncovered a bit of cheating with statistics when the film first came out. For example, the studies used to claim that the U.S. spends $7000 per individual on health care and Cuba spends only $251 were made in different years and had different scopes (read more about this here: CNN's response to Michael Moore). The study that said Cuba spent $251 per year also said that the U.S. spent $5,711, and one has to wonder why they wouldn't use that figure if it wasn't a deliberate attempt to exaggerate.

I was probably all wound-up in irritation mode by the time the movie reached what struck me as a frightening bit of self-righteousness. Apparently the guy who had the "most notable" Michael-Moore-hatred website had to shut it down because his wife became ill and they needed to save all the money possible for her treatment. Moore talked about how he anonymously sent the $12,000 that they needed in order to get her care. He showed screenies of the e-mails the man sent in reply to his "Guardian Angel." Well, it's not "anonymous" anymore. By putting it in the movie, it strikes me that he took something charitable and turned it into a childish and self-serving "screw you!"

But there were at least two things right in the movie. The first is that we need a better system in the states. The second is that we really are taught subtly from an early age to hate French people. What the hell is that about? Oh well, I'm sure they hated us first. Silly baguette-eaters and their awesome health care can't be trusted!

(Google Analytics claims that a person from France reads my blog. I'm hoping said person understands sarcasm.)

Artificial?

2008-08-30T08:05:00.004+02:00

One of the many things that people seem to be amateurishly fascinated with decrying is "artificial" food additives, preservatives, colors, flavors, etc. In the U.S. colors are often specified in the form of "D&C Red #40" or "D&C Yellow #2". Preservatives and other additives are usually spelled out in all their chemical glory -- monosodium glutamate, thiamin monoitrate, etc.

If you read the ingredients on a product in Sweden, these additives are listed with E-numbers. I'm not sure what the E stands for, although the best guess is always Europe or European, as many standards are today set on that level. People love to hate the E-numbers. Look at all the artificial crap in the food we eat! There's an E-something in almost everything in my cupboard. No wonder we're all fat and sick!

Now, I'm not saying I was ever on this bandwagon, and in fact I mostly figured that people who don't like "all these E-ämnen" could start eating some fresh fruit and vegetables and stop bitching, so don't get the impression that I had a life-changing revelation while looking at my marmelade this morning. But it definitely gave me a quandry. I noticed that there were two E-additivess in my red onion cumberland: E162 and E440. In the Swedish ingredients, that is. But right after Swedish, the ingredients were listed in German or Dutch, and there were no E-numbers listed at all. In their place I read bietenrood and pektin. When I looked up E162 and E440 at Livsmedelverket's website, I saw that my super German-or-Dutch sleuthing skills did not fail me -- E162 is juice from red beets and E440 is pectin.

So, if I understand correctly the urgings of all the people who decry the E-additives (all while happily eating Cheet-os and Billy's pizza and such), I'm supposed to be upset about my food containing beetroot juice and a natural extract from fruit that our great-grannies used to thicken their homemade jams?

Okay, so one part of this doesn't shock me. That is, the fact that people out there might complain about how many "artificial" additives there are in their food while all the while continuing to eat all of it, that doesn't shock me. Especially in this country, where so many are more likely to see it as the government's responsibility to pass laws (all problems are solved by passing laws) that require food companies to stop using additives, rather than seeing it as their own responsibility to choose foods without these additives if they're so keen on not taking them in. It doesn't surprise me, either, that most of them are unaware that many of these E-additives can also be found naturally in a banana or a glass of tap water. I also get that some of these E-additives sound very scary. Looking at the list, I see that E513 is svavelsyra (sulfuric acid). I guess surströmming has to be made out of something...

No, what does surprise me is that they are written this way in the ingredients. I understand why a bag of Cheet-os in the U.S. lists riboflavin and thiamin monoitrate in the ingredients instead of vitamins B1 and B2. We thank those regulations that keep laymen from thinking, "Awesome, Cheet-os have vitamins!" and instead list such nutrition facts in their own little box. However, I cannot for the life of me understand why it is better for the consumer to write E162 instead of beetroot juice. Wouldn't we want people to know that what they're eating is actually made from stuff that grows out of the ground? Or do we want to force vegetarians or people with this or that allergy to look up and memorize which E-codes go along with foods they shouldn't eat? What's worse, the E-code isn't always legally required, but can be replaced by the "function name" of the additives. Instead of writing E440, for instead, it's acceptable to write förtjockningsmedel (thickener). But again, if I'm a vegetarian, I would very much appreciate knowing if that thickener is gelatin or pectin, wouldn't I? Or in my case, sötningsmedel (sweetener) is a thought-provoker, as I get migraines from aspartame but not from other artificial sweeteners. At least if they wrote E951 I would learn to recognize it, by why not just write aspartame?

It just all strikes me as ridiculous given that ingredients are listed on food products for the purpose of keeping the consumer informed, probably prompted by such things as allergies or moral convictions or the like, the exact kinds of goals that make the ingredients list pointless if it is obfuscated with a bunch of numbers and vague category names that all mean wink wink, nudge nudge, we squeezed a beet into your jam.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to pack up and head to Karlstad, where I will be participating in the ritual intake of cambaridae and the acidified and coagulated results of a bacterial process performed on bovine lactate, but choosing not to join in the imbibing of distilled grain extract.

Puzzling

2008-08-27T20:55:00.002+02:00

Addictive: http://www.puzzles.com/projects/LogicProblems.html .

Stand-in

2008-08-20T11:40:00.005+02:00

By now I'm sure everyone has read about how the little Chinese girl who sang while the Chinese flag was marched in during the Olympic opening ceremonies was actually lip-syncing. Here you have the news from Dagens Nyheter and here you have it from CNN.

The actual, and amazing, 7-year old singer Yang Peiyi apparently wasn't cute enough. She had a "round face" and "uneven teeth" (so very shocking for a 7-year old!). The lip-syncer was deemed to have the properly cutesy appearance. According to the musical director, and I'm translating from the Swedish article, "The reason that Yang couldn't be seen was that we wanted to project the right image. We were acting in the nation's best interests."

Well, I'd say we got the right image, alright, but whether or not it was in the nation's best interests is debatable.

Punk

2008-08-17T18:56:00.003+02:00

I must heartiliy apologize to anyone reading this for the fact that I haven't written anything for a while. I'm feeling so very punk that I'm learning a new meaning of punk. I've been like this for a week and the upcoming week doesn't promise to be any better.

As is often the case, Fredrik is feeling the same way. Misery loves company, and we do an increasingly better job of being sick at the same time. What's more, it has rained here every day for the last two weeks, and that shows no signs of stopping, either. My normal strategy of trying to get a little bit of exercise when I'm sick so that it doesn't become a vicious cycle has been completely thwarted by the constant cats-and-dogs, and the vicious cycle is officially here. I am alternating between the bed and the couch.

But what I can't complain about is the vivid dreams I've been having lately. Last night there was one that somehow involved me both living and working in a huge shopping-mall-type complex that also seemed to be the last stop on some sort of subway/monorail system. On the day played out in the dream, the train driver overshot the end of the track three times, the last time completely demolishing some sort of Mrs. Field's-type cookie shop. I had some very cross words with the train driver, telling him that it wasn't going to look good at his upcoming performance review and that Martinis before lunch weren't a good idea.

In fact, the whole layout of the mall/office in my dream looked an awful lot like the Mall of America, where there was, if my memory served me correctly, a cookie shop across from the Orange Julius in the bit of 2nd floor East Broadway that overlooked the amusement park. I had to surf to their website to confirm that my memory served me correctly. It did. (The cookie shop is called the Nestlé Toll House Café.) Are we frightened that I remember exact locations of shops that I never even patronized in the largest mall in the U.S.? No, we're not, because everyone needs a talent.

I noticed on their website that the amusement park, which was originally called Camp Snoopy, is now called Nickelodeon Universe, and it's a foamy Spongebob Squarepants instead of a foamy Charlie Brown running rampant inside. Not that Charlie Brown probably ever "runs rampant," perhaps that was the reason they ditched that particular hometown hero. Peanuts: just not ADD enough for modern America.

Heartbreak

2008-08-07T07:35:00.002+02:00

I hang out at a forum for women who have experienced late miscarriages, multiple miscarriages or stillbirths. There are several women there who are pregnant now, and we chat back and forth about how it's going for them, grilling them intensely to make sure they're doing alright, because that makes us feel that we're going to be alright, too.

One of the ladies found out at a scan this morning that her little baby is not alive. She was more than halfway through her pregnancy, and it's her second late loss in a row.

I'm heartbroken for her. I wish she could go to sleep and have the pain and the loss be gone when she wakes up, realize that it was just a terrible dream. Sadly, I know it will likely be the other way around -- each morning she will slowly remember what a few hours of sleep and dreams allowed her to temporarily forget.

There isn't much I can say, either to her or about her. I can just say that I'm so very sorry.

Incompetence, part 2

2008-08-05T09:22:00.004+02:00

Försäkringskassan continues to push the limits of how many amateur mistakes they can make in the realm of getting a piece of paper from one place to another.

The guy who is in charge of my case called me and said that he had received a copy of my employment contract but had not received the registration form.

I mentioned that I had sent the two in the same envelope.

I was told to send it again, and -- that's right -- to yet another new address.

During the conversation he was looking at my file in the population database (folkbokföringsregister) and said "Really, since you're a citizen, this isn't going to be a problem or anything."

Isn't it??

I've already been trying to get myself registered with you people for over two months. And what you're saying is that all the info that I've filled out on the registration form -- name, address, personal identification number, and that I'm a Swedish citizen -- is already right in front of your face on your computer screen...

No, I'm sure it will be no problem. I mean, seriously, what could go wrong?

Disorder

2008-08-03T17:06:00.003+02:00

Small bits of disorder in daily life make me grind my teeth. I don't like for things to be slightly broken, slightly dirty, slightly out of order, etc. Better for there not to be a single clean glass in the kitchen and a layer of mold growing on top of the standing water in the sink than for there to be a little spot of tomato sauce drying on the counter.

Today it was high time to give the house a good thorough cleaning. After I vacuumed the bedroom, I went to pull the plug for the vacuum cleaner out of the wall. To my surprise, the entire outlet followed along with it, which also ripped a bit of wallpaper away from the wall.

Now, just to be clear, we live in an almost brand-new house. We moved in last April before the paint was dry. This means that most everything else is the house is still shiny and there are even parts that still smell of fresh carpentry.

So I sat tranfixed on the floor, staring at this outlet, calling for Fredrik to come look at it immediately. After he tried to shove it back in and determined that it hadn't seemed to be screwed to anything, but rather just sort of resting in the little plastic eldosa thing (sorry, svengelska), he said he'd call the builders tomorrow.

Now, this is perfectly reasonable. The fact that we live in a nearly brand-new house does, technically, make the whole thing easier. We just call the builders and mention that our outlets seem to be held in place by a mixture of friction and faith that seems to be wearing quite thin and ask them to fix it. But I'm not quite patient enough for that. I imagine my eyes glazed over as I sat there on the floor, with tunnel vision for this tiny bit of chaos, and I was honestly considering starting to growl menacingly at it.

This is when it became clear that Fredrik is fully aware of many aspects of my OCD-lite or whatever it is. He's seen how I reacted to the grease stain on the wallpaper next to the dishwasher (not that anyone ever looks down there anyway), or how I spent a whole New Year's Eve snapping at my friends because a little piece of plastic broke off of our stove when we took the food out of the oven (it was replaced by our landlord as soon as we called, as the plastic bit had long since been recalled by Electrolux and replaced by a metal bit). He held out his hand to help me up and suggested we leave the room and play a board game.

If I have to have near-crippling psychological quirks, it's at least nice to know that I'm loved enough that someone understands them so well. Happy anniversary, Fredrik.

Party Game

2008-07-30T11:01:00.005+02:00

I'm sort of a film fanatic. My husband has travelled to Malaysia umpteen times for work. I'm a pretty big fan of free speech, not so keen on censorship, and fascinated by the (let's put it lightly and call them) "quirks" of deeply religious people. Put all these things together, and the result is a strange fascination of mine: IMDB's list of films that are banned in Malaysia.

Malaysia is a predominantly Muslim country that also has substantial Indian and Chinese populations. Different folk groups and religious groups are subject to different laws. Some of the list's contents are therefore not in the least bit surprising (Boogie Nights, anyone?). Some are momentarily surprising (Prince of Egypt, perhaps?) before they also become disappointingly obvious. Some are a bit fuzzier and require one to guess at which scene, seemingly relatively innocuous and only slightly provocative to us, would cause the Malaysian censorship board to ban an entire movie rather than simply cut certain scenes, as they often do with kissing scenes, nudity, swearing, violence, single scenes that can be sensitive religiously, and the like. Imagine what Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan looked like when they were finally let through (and they were; it's the full versions that are banned). I imagine they were collectively 5 minutes long.

Then there's Babe. And let's not believe that it was a temporary offense -- Babe: Pig in the City is also on the list.

Now, it's been a while since I've seen Babe. I'm also not a member of the Malaysian family values lobby. So coming up with what themes in Babe might have been so potentially destructive to the ethics of the Malaysian people requires a lot of thought. I notice that Charlotte's Web is not on the list, so apparently it's not simply outrage at the very idea of a talking pig.

So I suggest a new party game: explain why your favorite movie, TV show or book would be banned in Malaysia. I'm currently working on a good explanation for Mary Poppins. The person who comes up with the funniest but most convincing argument gets to take a shot -- which is, incidentally, also banned in Malaysia.

Mustard & Dill Sauce

2008-07-28T15:19:00.009+02:00

I haven't written for a while, but perhaps that's okay, because the one person who I know for sure reads my blog seems to have dropped off the face of the planet. But just in case he comes back, here's a pretty tasty sauce.

Mustard & Dill Sauce

2 T. butter (2 msk smör)
2 T. flour (2 msk vetemjöl)
3/4 cup water (2 dl vatten)
2 fish bullion cubes (1 fiskbuljongtärning)
3/4 cup milk (2 dl mellanmjölk)
1 T. dijon mustard (1 msk fransk senap)
4 T. lemon juice (4 msk färskpressad citron)
1 T. fresh dill (1 msk färsk dill)

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Whisk in the flour until thoroughly mixed. Add water and bullion and bring to a boil. Simmer for a few minutes. Mix in milk, mustard, lemon juice and dill, heat until warm.

Servings: 4
Calories per serving: 104
Protein: 2 g
Fat: 7 g
Carbohydrates: 7 g

Comments: The reason I've written 1 bullion cube in English and 2 bullion cubes in Swedish is that the typical bullion cube here is for a half a liter of water, whereas the bullion cubes we always had at home in the states were only for one cup.

We ate this with salmon, fresh pasta and green peas. It turned out to be, ahem, 745 Calories per portion -- fresh pasta apparently has quite a bit more calories per "serving" than your traditional boring dry pasta. But still, it's a tasty sauce for fish and pasta!

High Maintenance

2008-07-23T13:13:00.005+02:00

According to the Dagens Industri article Söner dyrare i drift, it costs noticably more to raise a boy in Sweden (from the ages of 4 to 18) than to raise a girl. The cost for navigating a boy through those ages is said to be 391,000 Swedish crowns (about $66,000 at today's exchange rate) whereas a girl is said to cost 302,000 Swedish crowns ($51,000). Strangely enough, a good chunk of the descrepancy is said to lie in the fact that the boys apparently cause twice as much monetary damage in the clothing department.

In a way, since the cost of living is higher in Sweden, and whatever can be bought for 391,000 SEK in Sweden could perhaps be bought for, say, $40,000 in the States, $40,000 would perhaps be a more accurate translation.

The website Babycenter.com has a little tool for calculating the cost of raising a child in the States. It asks you to fill in a bit more info about your own situation, including what part of the U.S. you live in, how much money you make, whether it's one or two parents in the family and what kind of college, if any, you plan on sending Junior to. I filled out info that most closely matches our own, including "No College" since university is fee-free in Sweden, and was told that it would cost us over $270,000 to raise a kid.

Huh.

Us Americans are clearly very high-maintenance creatures.

Incompetence

2008-07-22T13:54:00.008+02:00

The comic duo of Puke & Snot that is the main attraction of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival always included a one-liner in their show that runs through my head over and over again in life.

I feel like I'm riding through the sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. I'm in this shit, but I'm clearly above it.

If you've read my earlier posts, you already have the impression that the Swedish health care system doesn't earn a great deal of respect from me or strike me as full of competent people (and that's quite an understatement). This week I'm having a new experience with bloated and dysfunctional bureaucracy, and it's a two-fer involving both Försäkringskassan and the post office!

I've been on 50% sick leave since the beginning of June. This means that a doctor has declared that there is a good reason for me to work only 4 hours a day, has signed an official form stating such, and that both my employer and Försäkringskassan have received a copy of this form. Försäkringskassan are the people who are to pay me for the hours of missed work. Essentially, if you live and work in Sweden and cannot work for a medical reason, you get 80% of your normal pay for the time you've missed. Försäkringskassan, FK, are the people who pay you this money. They also pay lots of other things, like pension, maternity/paternity leave money, a monthly payment to anyone who has a kid under 16, subsidies to people who can't afford their rent, etc.

I've never received money from FK before, but I was aware that it would likely be an uphill battle -- if for no other reason than it's just typical that you'll have to end up fighting with a disorganized fiasco of an organization when you are sick and don't have the energy for it.

I have lived in Sweden for 6 years, and have been an official resident (folkbokförd) during that entire time. (I don't even get how you can live here without being folkbokförd, unless you're an illegal immigrant, in which case I would presume you don't have the right to money from FK, which makes the point moot.) I'm also a Swedish citizen, so I figured that I didn't have to do anything special in order to get my sick-leave money. The HR lady at work agreed, saying that it's supposed to work automatically after she sends them my bank account number and the number of hours I've been away from work. She should know -- it's not like I'm the first employee here to be on sick leave.

Still, I wanted to make sure, so I checked at FK's website. According to them, if you are officially a resident of Sweden, you do not have to register with FK. (For the benefit of Swedish readers, it reads thus: Är du folkbokförd i Sverige behöver du inte registrera dig i Försäkringskassan.)

This turns out to be a lie.

As soon as my employer had sent in the papers about my sick-leave, I received a form home in the mail. It was called Information for Registration (Uppgifter för registrering). It came without instructions or explanation, and the questions were very difficult to answer. Why have you come to Sweden? How long do you plan on staying? In what country are you a citizen? Are your spouse and children coming to Sweden with you? When did you start working at your current job? Where did you work in your home country? They even had a section where I was supposed to check off which documents I was attaching, with the note "NOTE! Some attachments are required!" But, of course, it didn't say which attachments were required. The only documents that they seemed definitely to want were a copy of either my residence permit or my work permit -- neither of which I have because I'm a bloody citizen.

I called them and complained of the paradox that they had placed before me. When I explaiend that I've lived here 6 years and have been a citizen for 3, she sheepishly (and stupidly) said, "We're not used to people already being citizens before they get involved with the welfare system." (It sounds better in Swedish: "Vi är inte vana vid att folk hinner bli medborgare innan de blandar sig med välfärdsystemet.") She encouraged me to fill in the form to the best of my abilities and add an extra sheet explaining everything.

She also said I would have to send a copy of my employment contract. Apparently the fact that it's my employer that reports me sick and tells them how much money to pay me isn't good enough; I have to send my own written proof that I work here and have that salary. Friends of mine who have gotten various forms of payments from FK have not had to provide this much proof; and by this point I was really starting to tend towards outraged. The extra burden of proof on me can not be said to be a result of me being a foreigner, because I am not a foreigner -- I was a foreigner, and quite some time ago.

Anyway. I sent off the form, the explanatory letter, and the copy of my employment contract to the address that was written on the form. It said, very clearly at the top of the form, "Send this form back to the following address." I had also asked the lady on the phone, "Is it this address in Malmö that I send it to?" She confirmed. Alright then.

The letter was sent on June 30, and seriously, ought to have been delivered July 1. But just yesterday when I came to work I got an e-mail from our HR lady saying that just last week she'd called FK and been told that my sick-leave had been denied because I wasn't registered with FK. So I got on the phone to them and started asking what the hell was going on, and was told that "one month isn't enough time for your registration to go through." What?! It takes more than a month to type in my name, address, and how much money I make? Seriously? They said they would contact the person in charge of my case and have them call me.

This is where it gets fun, and where the post office gets involved.

I went home from work -- without having received the promised phone call from FK of course -- and found that the registration form had been delivered back to me, three weeks after I had sent it, and with a note from the post office saying "Address does not exist."

Upon contacting FK again today, I was told, "So sorry, here's the address you want. It's in Visby." But... what? I can understand if some schmuck had wrongly written an address to some FK office in Malmö on my form when it was really an FK office a thousand kilometers away that was supposed to be handling it, but the part that gets me is that they would have written an address that doesn't exist.

So I do a little investigation of the envelope and at the post office's website. The address was P.O. Box 4080, 302 11 Malmö. My envelope clearly did make it to Malmö, as it was stamped as coming from Malmö on its return to me. At the post office's website, I see that P.O. Box 4080 is very much in existence in Malmö -- but the post code is not 302 11, but rather, 203 11. The fact that the post office apparently wracked their brains over this for 3 weeks and apparently couldn't figure it out anyway blows my mind. I can just see them, standing with my envelope in hand, 3 feet away from P.O. Box 4080, going "Gosh, it SAYS Malmö, but the post code is so totally all wrong! Dunno what to do!"

I called again today to complain that my contact person never returned my phone call as promised, and was given yet another address -- not an address in Malmö, not an address in Visby as I was given by e-mail, an address in Östersund.

So somehow a person at FK managed to write the wrong destination, complete with the wrong post code for that destination; they can't seem to decide what the right destination is; the post office manages to get a letter to the right location without having the right post code but then is unable to put a piece of paper in a box; and all this for a form that I really shouldn't have to fill out anyway, but will now have to send again and apparently wait more than a month to get a response.

That response will probably be something about how sick pay has to be claimed within 45 days of missing work or something.

Wild Rice Pilaf

2008-07-21T17:45:00.007+02:00

Wild rice is the state grain of my home state of Minnesota. It's very important to have a state grain; the international community just won't take you seriously if you don't take a stand on these things.

As the name suggests, it grows, well, wild. If you drive through the Borreal forrest areas of Northern Minnesota, every mile or so you see a sign saying, "Wild Rice, 5 lb for $8.99." Or at least that's what it cost when I was 18 and driving up to Thunder Bay; perhaps there has been inflation.

It's one of the things I try to bring back with me when I visit the states, as it's tough to find here, but lately I have seen it popping up here and there as food markets experience a sort of variety explosion here in Sweden.

The award for most delicious use of wild rice has to go to Byerly's Wild Rice Soup, in my opinion. Byerly's is a kind of special phenomenon in St. Paul -- if you've ever walked through the grocery store and thought "This experience could be made better if the floor were carpetted and there were crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling," then you'd like Byerly's.

The following is a side dish I devised to mimic the sort of ready-made blends of spices, white and wild rice (Uncle Ben's, Rice-a-roni, etc.) that are commonly available back in the States.

White and Wild Rice Pilaf

1 T. parsley (1 msk persilja)
1 t. thyme (1 tsk timjan)
1 t. tarragon (1 tsk dragon)
½ t. onion powder (½ tsk lökpulver)
½ t. garlic powder (½ tsk vitlökspulver)
½ t. basil (½ tsk basilika)
½ t. marjoram (½ tsk mejram)
½ t. white pepper (½ tsk vitpeppar)
½ t. salt (½ tsk salt)
½ cup uncooked wild rice (1 dl okokt vildris)
1 T. butter (1 msk smör)
1 small yellow onion, chopped (1 gul lök, hackad)
2 ½ cups broth (7 dl buljong)
¾ cup uncooked long grain rice (2 dl okokt parboiled ris)
1 can green beans, drained (250 gram haricot verts konserv utan lag)
1 can sliced mushrooms, drained (250 gram champinjoner konserv utan lag)

Mix all the spices and the wild rice together.

In a medium-sized pot, cook the onion in butter until soft and clear. Add the broth and the wild rice and spices mix. Bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for about 20 minutes. Add the white rice; cover and simmer for 20 more minutes. Remove from heat and mix in the green beans and mushrooms. Let sit, covered, for 5 minutes.

Servings: 4
Calories per serving: 277
Fat: 5 g
Protein: 5 g
Carbohydrates: 52 g

Comments: You might find that there are two types of wild rice available: whole and cracked. This recipe assumes you use whole wild rice, because that's the only type I can find around here. If you use cracked wild rice, it gets easier and takes less time: blend in the white rice at the beginning with the wild rice and spices, and the whole thing only needs to be boiled for 20 minutes total instead of 40.

I serve this side dish with ham and apple sauce, and the hubby gave it a score of 7 out of 10. With 4 oz of lean smoked ham and some low-sugar apple sauce, this meal has only 445 Calories.

Semantics

2008-07-20T19:41:00.008+02:00

Subtle differences in the way two people might say a thing when they (think they) both mean the same thing can make a world of difference. Warning -- this post is not about food.

Losing a pregnancy could, I'm convinced, break just about anyone. Having a miscarriage when you don't yet have any children is, from the mouths of many psychologists, on a whole other level. Having the pretty rare experience of miscarrying after the 12th week of pregnancy brings it to yet another level, especially if you've already "seen" the baby kicking and waving and swimming around on an ultrasound, and been told that it looks "just fine". A whole new form of debilitating grief is introduced if you've had unusual family losses before.

What I didn't need, in other words, was for the handling of my miscarriage in the emergency room to become a case study for Linköping's university hospital's doctors, nurses and students on how not to treat a patient.

During our meeting with the head of the emergency clinic, we were assured that nothing was acceptable about the way I was treated when I came in in the middle of the night, 17 weeks pregnant, in excruciating pain and dripping with blood. I shouldn't have been told to wait, I shouldn't have had to pass a dead child out into a toilet because no one was helping me, I shouldn't have been treated rudely, as though I was disrupting someone's otherwise peaceful night, and my husband and I definitely shouldn't have had to see our baby flushed down a toilet, in front of our eyes.

We should have been helped immediately, we were assured, without waiting or taking a damn queue number. We should have been treated delicately, with regard shown to the loss that still had us in shock. We should have been asked if we wanted to hold our baby, know what sex it was, give it a name and a burial, and been asked if we wanted an autopsy done.

These assurances, I assume, are meant to make me feel better. They show me that they agree with me about my treatment being unacceptable. They tell me that it's good that I wrote letters to all the essential persons, because now they can prevent this sort of thing from happening again. They insist that I shouldn't for a moment expect that this would happen again the next time I'm pregnant and if, god forbid, I come in to the ER for a similar reason. They tell me that my story is so shocking that they can barely believe their ears and they are ashamed. We do not accept this kind of behavior from our staff, and only a fraction of a percent of the time do things go wrong. The ER's resident gynecologist was there as well, also assuring me that I should see my late miscarriage as a freak coincidence; it happened "for no reason" and "next time everything will most likely go just fine."

I sit there in the office of the ER chief, shaking and sobbing and hyperventilating from having to return to "the scene of the crime," staring at the little paper cups and juice that she's set out for our little meeting. I hear these assurances and reassurances and assistances that the behavior of one of her employees is shockingly unacceptable, but I am not reassured. What I hear is this:

"The vast majority of our patients are treated with care and professionalism. The vast majority of pregnancies go to term. The vast majority of miscarriages are the result of random chromosomal errors and happen before the 12th week. For some reason, you are in none of these cases in the vast majority."

And I wonder what that reason is. I feel worthless and wonder what it is about me that puts me among the chosen one tenth of one percent.

Today Fredrik and I drove to the grocery store. I was driving, as I'm practicing to get my license. I made a mistake entering a roundabout, Fredrik freaked out a bit, and I, already on the emotional edge the last few days, burst into tears. We sat in the parking lot for a good deal of time, me totally broken down and taking choppy breaths through uncontrollable sobbing. Fredrik held me and said:

"You don't deserve the things that have happened to you."

And I agree. I feel just a little proud and strong and give the universe, and that nurse, the finger.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

2008-07-18T10:35:00.005+02:00

It's time to get tough, I said, and up the gym visits and lower the junk food. Gotta give yourself 8 solid weeks of being a good girl, eating right, working out, and not giving up if the scale spits out lies and slander the for the first couple of weeks.

So far, I've succeeded in this mission for 5 days. Been a super good girl. Today, I'm a little good-naturedly frustrated with the exponential difficulty of being a good girl.

I've exercised at least one hour every day this week. Every other day it's been intense at the gym, the other days it's been bike trips downtown to run this or that errand. Last night we even took a walk over to our friends' new house, and thanks to our mutually poor sense of direction, we were walking for an hour.

The rate at which my strength and cardio endurance improve are fascinating. I did the exact same workout on Monday, Wednesday, and today: 35 minutes on one of these X-country ski-like elliptical machines and then 45 minutes of weight lifting according to a program I got from the PT at my gym. The trusty Polar pulse watch was with me, of course. On Monday, my heart rate was up above 180 -- which is not super super high for me, because if I run it's up around 200; I'm like a small rodent -- on Wednesday it was about 170, and today the same elliptical workout kept me around 160, despite the fact that I was consciously trying to spin my legs faster than before and keep the RPMs above 50.

The upside is that it's a reminder that the body really does get stronger quite quickly once you manage to stick to a routine.

The downside is that getting stronger is my secondary goal -- losing weight is my primary (well, arguably, losing weight in order to get stronger). And where I burned around 500 Calories during my workout on Monday, I only managed to rid myself of 390 today. Plus, if these workouts are making me stronger and giving me more energy, someone tell me why it's tough to drag myself out of bed at 8 in the morning and why I must wince every time I raise my arms above my head 3-4 days after each workout. Anyone?

Whining aside, I'm quite proud of myself. Aside from the exercise routine, I've had a week packed full of fruits, veggies, no alcohol (admittedly, not tough), very little coffee (a little tougher!), and only one bout of "I'm too lazy to cook" that led me to eat at McDonald's. But it's okay -- I had a Happy Meal, only 590 Calories. ;)

Italian Sausage and Lentil Soup

2008-07-16T12:44:00.010+02:00

Here it is, as promised, the recipe that hubby gave 8 out of 10! God, I hope it’s not a big anti-climax.

This recipe was inspired by a meal that we had while on our Honeymoon in Rome. We ate at a wine bar called Trimani, and I definitely recommend the place. I’m also a big fan of Italian sausage, at least in the sense that I always ordered sausage and mushroom when the occasion called for pizza back home. I wanted to learn what it was that gave it its unique flavor. Turns out it’s anis seed! I got some help from Emeril Lagasse, actually, as I snuck a peek at his recipe for Mild Italian Sausage and adapted accordingly.

Italian Sausage and Lentil Soup

6 oz dry lentils (2 dl linser)
1 lb ground pork (400 g fläskfärs)
1 egg (1 ägg)
½ cup milk (1 dl mellanmjölk)
1 ½ t paprika (1 ½ tsk paprikapulver)
1 t anis or fennel seed, crushed (1 tsk anis- eller fänkålsfrön, krossade)
1 t salt (1 tsk salt)
1 t black pepper (1 tsk svartpeppar)
1 t cayenne pepper (1 tsk cayennepeppar)
1 t garlic powder (1 tsk vitlökspulver)
½ t tarragon (½ tsk dragon)
1 T fresh parsley (1 msk färsk persilja)
1 ½ T butter (25 g smör)
1 yellow onion, finely chopped (1 gul lök, finhackad)
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped (2 vitlöksklyftor, finhackade)
2 T flour (2 msk vetemjöl)
4 cups broth (1 l buljong)

Soak the lentils in cold water for 2-3 hours. Boil them in fresh water for about 20 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Mix the meat, egg, milk and all the spices; set aside.

Cook the onions and garlic in butter until the onions are soft and clear. Add the flour so that it coats the onions and garlic. Add broth and bring to a boil. While the liquid is simmering, drop the meat in small spoonfuls into the water. (You can roll it into little meatballs if you have the patience; I didn’t.) Finally, add the lentils and cook until everything is warm.

Servings: 4
Calories per serving: 479 (with 20% fat pork and 2% milk)
Fat: 28 g
Protein: 29 g
Carbohydrates: 27 g

Comments: 53% of the Calories in this recipe come from fat, and since the fat is from ground pork and butter, it’s probably a lot of saturated fat. So this isn’t the kind of thing you want to eat every day if you’re super picky about taking care of your heart. However, it’s low calorie, contains a good helping of legumes, which most people don’t get enough of, and it tastes good!

Recipes

2008-07-15T21:30:00.002+02:00

Like I said in my first post, I hope to post a lot of recipes here on my blog. Again, I don't consider myself a super fabulous cook, but I enjoy cooking and am getting better all the time. It was Sunday night's dinner that rated an 8 out of 10 from my hubby (a level that he has descibred as "I wouldn't mind paying for this at a restaurant") that inspired me to finally start writing a blog.

But just to add to the suspense a bit more, I felt it was necessary to make a pre-recipe post, explaining a little of this and that.

I play around both with American recipes and Swedish ones, but in the end, it's a Swedish kitchen that I have. That means that the measurements in my recipes tend to be in grams and deciliters, especially the recipes I've made up myself. It also means that a recipe of mine might not work as well in the States -- I've discovered, for instance, that flour here doesn't have the same amount of protein and that that can really ruin a cake. When I write the recipes in English I will write with the American system of cups and ounces, but that means some of the measurements might look quite strange. I will, however, attempt to post the recipes in both English and Swedish. This is surely fun for the whole family.

I use a kitchen scale to measure a lot of my ingedients, which I know is uncommon in America. However, if you're interested in food, or especially if you're interested in losing weight or watching what you eat, I would heartily suggest you get a kitchen scale! And that you learn the metric system. And that the U.S. nutrition labelling guidelines switch to "Nutrients per 100 grams" instead of this "Nutrients per What Some Committee Has Decided Is One Serving" nonsense.

But I digress.

For me, cooking is fun not just because I like food and like to try out new ingredients and meals. It's also a challenge to try to make the food healthy as well as tasty. Both the Swedish and the American governments have departments whose job it is to decide how we should eat. To American ears that all sounds very big-brother; perhaps most of us don't actually know it, but it is The USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services that came up with that food pyramid that was all over food packaging about 10 years ago. In 2005 they revised their Dietary Guidelines in a way that accounts more for the fact that we're all different sizes and genders and that children eat, too. In Sweden, the body that tells us how to eat is Livsmedelsverket. I know that the U.K. has government dietary guidelines as well, from hearing Gillian Keith mention them often on the TV show You Are what you Eat.

It may not come as a shock to anyone, but all of these dietary guidelines are very similar. The U.S. version now suggests we eat 2 cups of fruit and 2 1/2 cups of vegetables per day. The Swedish version states that we need 500 grams of fruit and veg daily, about 250 grams of each. This works out to the same amount, basically (and it's also an example of how Americans measure by volume and Swedes by weight!). What I like about the USDA Dietary Guidelines is that they go into detail about different kinds of vegetables and why we need them. They've also included appendixes with lists of calcium, fiber and vitamin content of various foods, different diet suggestions depending on age, gender and activity level, etc.

Okay, what am I getting at? I know that most people are not the types to sit and read an 84-page PDF about how the government thinks you should eat. But it's the kind of thing that I admit to thinking is pretty fun, and I like having a goal to strive towards in my quest to eat more healthily. And it's nothing extreme, like becoming a strict vegan or only eating raw food or never eating bread and meat on the same days or drinking gelatinated flax seeds every morning to get your proper weight-loss chi activated.

So the recipes that I make for my little family reflect these guidelines to the best of my ability. I try to make every lunch or dinner portion contain at least 125 grams of vegetables, and make an effort to vary them among the 5 types of green leafy, orange, beans, starchy, and "other". I try to use whole-grain carbs and pack in some fiber here and there. I try to vary the type of meat we eat and choose lower-fat alternatives when it won't drastically affect the taste or consistency of our food. You won't find a lot of dairy and fruit in my lunch and dinner-type recipes, however, because I pack those in for breakfast and snacks.

Aside from trying to follow guidelines for what our food should contain, I also struggle to make sure we don't eat too much of it. I've been overweight since I was 16, and at its worst I weighed 115 kg. When I moved to Sweden, rather than the pounds melting away as everyone predicted (it's magic fairy dust in the air that keeps Europeans slim, don't you know), I stayed at the same weight while Fredrik went up about 15 kg under my influence. A few years later, Fredrik found the website Viktklubb.se, where members can devise a personal weight-loss program and, by writing in what they eat and what exercise they do, get their Calories counted up for them as a tool to keep them on track. This website has been nothing short of a miracle for me. I'm a mathematician and obsessed with numbers (ask me how many steps it takes to get from my house to my office), so having a concrete and simple way to count my Calories was just the thing. When you count Calories, no food is forbidden; it's much better to make that pasta with cream instead of skim milk; the key is to eat a reasonable amount of it.

I lost 35 kg in 2 years, and then hit a plateau. That plateau was named "full-time employment with paid lunches." But I'm still workin' on it, dag-nabbit. (Fredrik also lost his 15 kg, and I'm very proud of him!)

So, the point at the end of my rambling is this:

My recipes may look strange to an American if they call for five-twelfths of a cup of something, or give the amount by weight instead of volume, but now you understand why. But I will attempt to round off to the nearest sensible unit.
I try to pack in lots of veggies and grains and goodness into dinner when I can.
Lunch and dinner recipes are almost always under 600 Calories, and if you're a follower of Atkins or GI or the Pineapple Method or whatever, that's great for you I'm sure, but this is how I do things.
I'm a geek who reads and re-reads government publications.

Swenglish

2008-07-14T11:04:00.005+02:00

This is the first of a few introductory, explanatory posts that I plan on making. It's a warning about how, if you read this blog often, you will likely encounter a lot of Swenglish.

I moved to Sweden in 2002, when I was 24 years old. Up until that point the only language I could speak was (American) English. I'd studied two years of French in high school, but done an exemplary job of forgetting it all. I'd also studied ancient Greek to get my language points for graduation from St. Olaf, and you can probably never really say that you "speak" ancient Greek. We mostly read and translated Plato and the Bible, and even that at the rate of about two sentences per hour. It did, however, leave me with a sick level of understanding for the complexities of grammar and a thankfulness that I didn't speak a language with severely declined nouns and both imperfect and aorist verb forms.

That might be why I had a pretty easy time learning Swedish. For the first year I lived here, I tried to learn the language on my own, and it didn't go so well. I had learned lots of food words, since my main occupation was buying groceries, but otherwise I wasn't prepared to have more than a very simple conversation. If I tried to practice speaking Swedish, people would hear that I stumbled and had an accent, so they started excitedly speaking English to me, in order to show off and/or practice their own English skills. It became clear to me that I wasn't going to get a job here unless I learned the language and bowed to their view that Swedish degrees are oh-so-much better than foreign ones, so I got myself into a program at the university that both taught me the language and turned my American degree into a Swedish teaching license.

My Swedish teachers were, well, brutal. We had two language and grammar teachers, one pronunciation teacher, a history teacher and a civics teacher. We had class 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, from the beginning of August until the end of May. We had mountains of homework every night. We didn't have school breaks when the rest of the university students did, except for something like one week at Christmas. Every time we made a mistake -- typically with word order i subclauses, for all you other non-native Swedish-speaking grammar freaks out there! -- the teachers snapped their fingers and made us say it over again. It was all about creating good habits and nipping the bad habits in the bud. By Christmas, I was suddenly a fluent reader and writer and could understand the news anchors on TV; by May I could speak fluently about just about anything. After our final test, which essentially gave us a Swedish high school diploma, there was much drinking, smoking, and swearing (in English, let's be honest). We got kicked out of a pub and our Australian classmate broke his nose after an impressive drunken flying bike incident. Good times.

However, no matter how much I wanted to learn Swedish or how well I speak it now, we still speak English at home, Fredrik and I. Some people have a hard time understanding this, not least of whom the head teacher in our Swedish course. She felt I would learn even faster if we spoke English at home. I felt, on the contrary, that either Fredrik or I would end up strangling the other and I'd be packing my bags for the U.S., which is the definition of shooting oneself in the foot. I learned Swedish well enough that people are now shocked that I'm not a native Swede when I tell them, and our relationship and patterns at home, a life very much built around the English language, are happily intact.

But something happens when you live one life in one language and another life in another. I not only spend much of my outward social life and work life in Swedish, but I got my teaching degree here, so there are words and concepts that I never spoke about until I spoke about them in Swedish. Some words about the educational system or the welfare system or mortgages or fertility or stock markets or things that are peculiarly Swedish -- I never spoke about them in English, so my mind doesn't find the English words for them. It happens that I need to run to a dictionary in order to translate something from Swedish into English -- and now, keep in mind, I'm not just a native-speaking grammatical-freak type English speaker; I'm now a Master degreed licensed teacher in the stuff. So this mental block is, to say the least, a little sad.

But this is where Swenglish comes in. Or svengelska, as it is called in Swedish. It's difficult to hear a conversation in Swedish today that isn't peppered with English words. The whole of Sweden is suffering from the same disease I am -- an inability to speak in their own language without throwing in words from another, because English so permeates every aspect of this society. My coworkers look at me a little funny when I say "mjukvarupaket" instead of "software package" and if I pronounce "integration" in the Swedish manner instead of in English. So it's not so terrible that I speak in English of having a faluröd house with vita knutar (a red house with white trim, part of the Swedish equivalent of the American dream) or if I have a conversation with my husband about paying our "fastigshetskatt" because my mind is a split-second too slow in providing the word "property tax," or, even more subtly, if I say that these blueberries are awful because they "don't taste anything" instead of saying "they have no flavor".

It's tough to fight it but, hey, I think I'm in good company. Henrik Schyffert is Packed on the Jobb.

You're fascinated already.

2008-07-13T19:52:00.004+02:00

My husband keeps telling me I should write a blog. I've never quite understood why, and it seems to me there can only be two possible explanations:

He thinks that what I have to say is fascinating and that I ought to share it with the rest of the world.
He thinks that what I have to say is getting really old and irritating and wishes I'd vent it out of my system on the web so that he doesn't have to hear it anymore.

The title of this blog is The Pessimist's Cookbook. Which of the above two explanations I am leaning towards will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Who are you then?

That question most likely doesn't need to be answered. You are here at my blog; that means that you can correctly spell my name; and that means that you're probably related to me. Lori Caeng... Seangi... Ceange... call me Tildy. For now. I will tell you more later, when you've proven that you want to know.

Pessimist?

Indeed. I officially come out of the closet and declare that I am a devout pessimist, impressively steadfast in my adherance to Murphy's Law and my conviction that everything will go down the pisser in much more creative ways than you've ever thought of. If you've ever read How to talk Minnesotan then you know that giving a thought to the worst-case-scenario is a time-honored emotional survival technique among my people. But wait -- we decided that you're probably related to me. This means you knew this already; that I am the local champion in competitive måla fan på väggen. But on the off chance that you are a person that doesn't share genes or maritally binding relations with me, what I'm trying to say is that some posts in this blog may be very negative, misanthropic and generally not very uplifting. Unless, of course, you are of a similar bent -- us types know for sure that misery loves company. A more specific warning is that some posts will inevitably revolve around a recent source of severe grief in my life, a late miscarriage we suffered in April while 4 months pregnant with what would have been our first child, and our attempts to get pregnant again.

Cookbook?

I'm not really as bad as all that. Some people might be downright surprised at the suggestion that there is actually a vitriolic people-hater under this milquetoast exterior. Well, it comes in waves, and between you and me, I'd love for the happy-positive-I-like-puppies-and-butterflies waves to be much more frequent. There are things and people that I love to see and do and talk about and that fill me up again when I'm feeling empty. What I really love the most, I've learned, is taking care of people. I love to be the one that brings an aspirin and a glass of water to my husband when he's got a headache. I love to be the one that has too much to do because I'm helping other people with their work. I love teaching people things so much that the word "love" is inadequate.

Those of you who have read How to talk Minnesotan, here comes your advantage again -- taking care of people, to me, has a whole lot to do with feeding them. It's become my hobby to plan meals and weekly menus (my husband might call it an obsessive-compulsive fixation, but I fail to see the difference) and, after losing over 35 kilos and still working on losing some more, I'm also very interested in constantly improving the nutritional quality of the food we eat and making sure we take care of our bodies. So I figured -- hey. That's what I could write about. Food, recipes, nutrition, losing weight. I'm not going to say here that I'm a really good cook, but I think I'm a person with an interest in cooking and a few nifty kitchen tricks that is on her way to becoming a really good cook. And I actually think that I know enough about "nutrition for the non-hippy" that I could teach other people about it. Although I am kind of a hippy. Sort of. To some people.

Fredrik?

So there you have two of the three most prevalent themes in my life. Cynicism and food. (Or did I mean right-wing type misanthropism and bleeding heart leftist hippiness? More on that later.) What's number three? That's my husband, Fredrik, of course. A man so infuriatingly positive and uninterested in baked goods that one can wonder why I moved across the Atlantic Ocean in order to build a life with him. The way to his heart might have been through his stomach, but it took me a while to figure out that it was a route better traveled by meat than by cakes and pies.

All of these three themes in my life are intertwined. I need to continue taking good care of myself and providing my body with quality fuel, nutrients and exercise in order to improve our chances for a successful pregnancy next time. My love of taking care of people (and feeding them) makes me more and more anxious to add a person to our family. And of course, Fredrik is the reason both for my desire to have a baby and my love of cooking. My father-in-law, who is the very talented cook in his household, apparently eats macoroni and falukorv (for you non-Swedes, it's about as classy as Kraft Mac n' Cheese) when my mother-in-law or anyone else isn't around for him to cook for. I totally get that. It's all about taking care of people.