Treasure Hunting

When I clean anyplace that I occupy, I should bring an anthropologist or a palientologist. Half the time I find things that I thought I lost months ago. Other things I didn't realize we owned! Thankfully, it only collects dust, not mold. I'm not that much of a slob. Well... Actually let's not go there. Nevertheless, on the first Saturday I've had off of work in months, I cleaned my living room. Partially.

If anyone needs a cure for insomnia, watch Solaris. I don't know about the George Clooney version, but the Russian subtitled version put me to sleep at least three times. I thought the part where Hari drinks liquid oxygen was neat, although disturbing. Then watching the special features, I fell asleep during that too! Now I know why people doze off when they don't understand what's going on. This may explain why so many university students fall asleep in class.

I certainly hope the book isn't quite like the movie was, in terms of atmosphere setting. The movie certainly set an atmosphere, but after awhile, I gave up trying to figure out what direction the movie was going.

Speaking of books, I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. That was a weird book, yet I'm intrigued how the movie holds up to it. I'll have to watch it with my wife so she can hide my eyes during the boob scenes. Unless I can find it on TV, and then I don't have anything to worry about. Hmmm... Maybe I can find an edited version somewhere. Setting that aside, it really does make you ponder the value of life, and what constitutes being alive. Right now we don't have much of an issue with computer sentience, yet I can't help but think that one day I'm going to get an error message on either an ATM, or my computer, or my PocketPC, or my cell phone, or the Moneris machine at work, or a customer is going to tell us about this error message that simply says, "I hate you." At first we might think that it's a joke the programmer put in to get back at his boss because he had to work one too many weekends, and it might be at first. But when the device actually comes forward and stops working, simply because it hates us all, we won't believe it. Not many believed B1-66ER and that caused decades of problems. A fictional account of course, but it parallels Dick's work.

This also seems to make me think about The Stepford Wives, and how I treat my own wife. Would I do the same thing as those men, have my wife replaced by a robot slave? How could someone even fathom doing that? In retrospect, I wouldn't call them 'men'. A man is the head of household, the patriarch of his family, but when he starts to be a dictator, that is when the title of man is stripped from him and a primal persona takes over. My wife has many names, and one of them is companion. Sometimes she leads and I follow. Other times the roles are reversed. We work together, and together, we make things work. Sounds cheesy, but it's what's kept us together for the past three years. Times have been hard, and we know they will get worse. I'm not a pessimist; I'm a realist. Before we got married I knew we would fall on hard times, all relationships do.

This morning, my beloved wife asked me, "Why do you keep loving me?" It took me awhile to come up with an answer that didn't sound ridiculous, ie. because there's so much of you to love. Finally I came up with the answer, "Because you keep changing". We might not have noticed how much we've changed over the past three years, but we acknowledge that we have. Every day and I love the same person I married, but I also meet a new person. Some who just had a dream or two. When I come home from work, I follow up on what she's done during the day, and sometimes during the day we catch up with each other. We guide and advise each other in decisions that change who we are, and who we will become. We share, we love, we grow.

I could go on, but I have to get some sleep. Plus I need to spend a good quantity of quality time with my queen.