The SWord for freedom

Last night, I had a very long and possibly the most bizarre dream of the year. I dreamt that I was pretending to be an AI robot doing various jobs. The first scene took place in a hotel, which seemed to be a love hotel. I pretended to be a robot servant, delivering items to guests' rooms, cleaning, and answering their various questions. The timeline seemed to be around 2010, when people hadn’t yet widely seen or used voice robots, so they were very intrigued by me, almost forgetting what they came there to do. They kept asking me all sorts of questions, and I tried to be able to answer them.. Later, they asked me to learn Chinese and respond in it. I replied that I hadn’t yet learned any other languages and asked for their forgiveness. (Of course, speaking Chinese would be easy for me, but I was afraid they would then ask me to speak Japanese or even Spanish, which would make me speechless.) Luckily, they didn’t ask further and eventually went back to doing what they came there for...

What I am about to write below is a magical story in my life. It has always encouraged me. Occasionally I think of it, and now I record it in detail here. In 2004, I started living in Tianjin , a city in northern China. My ex-girlfriend at the time was a kindergarten teacher. One evening she came to me in a big anxious, saying that their kindergarten was going to hold a sports event the next day, and there was some sewing work left to do, but she didn't have a sewing kit on hand, so she came to me to figure out what we can do. A common sewing kit in China,  not easy to bought because it is too inconspicuous At that era, shopping was not as convenient as it is today. There was no sewing kits in the small stores nearby. Finally I decided to take her to the largest Carrefour  supermarket in Tianjin, thinking that there would be sewing kits for sale. It was a slightly longer cab ride, and by the time we arrived at Carrefour it was about 9:30 p.m. The lights were half out at the su...