speaking of character or lack thereof, The Girl is (maybe) hooking us up with respite foster care, for which we'd take a 10-week class and get home inspections. if we passed the sniff test, we'd get emergency temporary foster placements.  so we had a little family summit about it, covering such topics as "Cal, you can't call your brother a cunt-nugget in front of home inspectors or in front of any foster kid old enough to talk".... we are not sure we can make the cut or would even like to try.  we would like to have tried at some prior time and already succeeded at passing inspection, but that's not the same thing now is it?  that's the same as my having liked to have volunteered for meals on wheels a long time ago and have brought food and a bit of emotional sustenance to many elderly shut ins by now, years of karma work would I have liked to have achieved the only way I could, i.e. by feeding people, which I could do, as in I could have already done, which clearly I have not enough :/

life was much easier before babies died in me, I see that now, but am now sure what to do about it, not sure what to do that I won't fail at further and hurt myself worse, which doesn't do anybody any good.  as it is, I am clingy and remote by turns in ways that stress out everyone around me for the affect it has on them and for the suffering they still see in me and can do nothing about.  like a flood plain just receded enough to look fine, but something better start growing to stabilize it and it'd better not rain more for a while :/

still, I dream of babies and toddlers, like the one last night that was like a little friend and we were visiting other people with kids too and there were all kinds of toys and activities but we grew tired of it and went back home to an all-white apartment where there was nothing but quiet and familiar things like our shoes and we liked it and I thought "I can't wait until everyone else is busy and has forgotten we are here" and the baby wordlessly agreed. I wake up from these dreams feeling like they are messages to which I should respond, but I don't know how.  meanwhile, Aa told me a story of a baby who was abandoned one day at the hospital, about 5 months old, a little girl with a deformed arm/hand that had a pincher in place of fingers, so someone who didn't want her dropped her off sick with an ear infection and never came back for her (this happens more than you'd think, to old people even more than to babies/kids, people just check them in and then leave and the hospital eventually has to discharge them to the state), and she cried incessantly until Aa, as the student at the time on rotation with no real assignment thus, picked her up and carried her around for his whole shifts, her grabbing at everything with her bad hand, shoving her pinchers up his nose to inspect. 

Shawn Colvin: I Don’t Want To Live On The Moon (orig. Sesame Street)