I'm fine. My girlfriends are on it and the weekend is looking good.

When I need consoling or sympathy, I go straight to Chris. It is perhaps his strongest gift. He is absolutely fearless about staying with a sad emotion, asking the hard questions that'll bring the hurt to the top to be soothed. He'll do it for trivial problems that feel big at the time, but he isn't afraid of the entire range. He's sat with dying people and the recently bereaved. He'll listen and cry and hug you when you need it or switch instantly back to joking, if that comes up. I don't know how he does it.

Anyway, the fucker didn't return my phone calls last night, so I'm totally gonna sandbag him next time we're at a party and he's trying to score.

The classic (and way over-discussed) debate about consoling people is the 'emotive listening vs offer constructive suggestion'. Whatever. They both have their place. Chris, in fact, takes the emotive listening too far. I'll wail, "Oh Chris!! Whatever should I do about this tragic thing?!?!" And he'll be all, "Megan, I can hear that you are hurt and uncertain and don't know how to proceed." And I'll be all, "No. I'm asking you. What should I DO?" So I'm pretty well past that debate. Have both skills at hand; be attentive to the sad person; switch back and forth between them.

The part I'm still working on is how frankly to acknowledge the suckiness. I'm such a cowardly avoider; where Chris is fearless, I usually try to murmur things like "it's not so bad, look on the bright side, it'll get better". I'm not sure that's best. One time, I hit it just right. This was horrible, but a brother of a friend was the victim of a home invasion and rape. I sent him a card that said essentially, "one day, this'll just be a really fucked up thing that happened and not your whole world." I might have actually written that. I heard back that he liked that card a lot. But I don't know if I could say that in person; I'm not brave like that. Maybe I should work on it. Sometimes things just suck. The sad person knows they suck; she's well aware of that. Pat reassurances either remind her of the difference between what she knows and the reassurance, or diminish her emotional reaction to the genuine suckiness.

So I'll try to do better. The best choice, of course, is to send in Chris. But if that isn't available to me, I want to live up to what friends need in sad times. Booooo! I hate being brave.