Last Friday I attended a training ostensibly about family therapy. In fact, as in most of these trainings, we watched one therapist discuss what he thinks therapy is. Everyone has a theory; everyone has a style; everyone is someone to whom I can unfavorably compare myself. Friday was especially good because I didn't think much about myself at all, but got all stirred up about meaning-making and human interaction and human pain. I was so stirred up that instead of thinking more about all of these things I spent the car ride home listening to Kanye West's mediocre new album, pushing the volume up louder and louder, trying to dance dance dance the confusion from my brain. When there are too many thoughts in my head and too many human emotions registering on my skin I feel a very particular elation that is also really tender and sad, and I have decided to label this feeling 'holy.'

It happens a great deal in Chicago, and usually after I have spent a chunk of time thinking about human need. Human needs for nurturance are particularly affecting to me. In that way I feel a little like a superhero that was given a particularly acute sense but no corresponding super power; so I can tell when someone needs something, and sometimes I can figure out what that thing is, but it all ends there. Perhaps if I saw myself as a kind but lazy hardware store employee instead of a superhero--"What you need, buddy, is a three quarter inch band saw." That's helpful. I'm not going to get up from behind the counter and get my buddy the fucking band saw. I am on the internet. I am updating my blog.

We saw a scrappy theater company's production of Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut. It was great. They did a good job, those scrappy actors and their crew. I was briefly in love with the young actor who portrayed Kurt Vonnegut. This infatuation, as I had predicted it would, only lasted three days. Anyway. Kurt's sister Alice died with the words "No pain" and Kurt himself has drawn his tombstone with the epitaph "Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt." I want to know what he means. In the end, does it all wash out? Does the pain become some sort of not pain? CS Lewis has something to say about this, I know. Armenians have a lot to say about pain. As a culture they talk about and express pain much more than Americans, and, from what I gather, the Irish. Other groups I can't speak on.

Right now, I think that I would like to get better at being with people as they think about and express their pain. I have the sense that this is the most I am going to be able to do, although some blueprint in me wants to give everyone magic keys that they can stick in their hearts. When they turn this key their pain clicks into the story of the rest of their lives, falling into a pretty mosaic pattern with all the other words we have for the things that happen to us.