So I hear a lot about how Swing isn't very thread safe.  So I'm being
very careful when a method running in a thread other than the event
dispatching thread changes my GUI widgets and wrap it in the
SwingUtilities.invokeLater() method.  So what do I do when I want to
pass information the other direction?  For example:

public class foo {
    JButton button;
    int x;
    int y;

    public foo() {
        button = new JButton("F");
        button.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                //Some code goes here
                x++;
                //Some other code goes here
                y++;
            }
        });
        javax.swing.Timer timer = new javax.swing.Timer(1000), new
ActionListener() {
         public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                System.out.println(x + ", " + y);
         }
        });
        timer.start();
    }
}

So how do I make sure that both x and y are updated in one atomic (and
thread safe) operation without running the risk that the timer's
println() statement will fire in between?  If the answer involves
using synchronized methods or variables, please include some example
code as I have yet to really understand the syntax of them.  Thanks
all!
-Will