diary notes #13
october 9th
I've been thinking: is there any peaceful place to live in Bangladesh, my home country whose language I can't read nor write? Is it possible to live here? Is it possible to carve my existence somewhere in this country, far away from the industrial mess that is Dhaka? Say I can't obtain citizenship to Canada or New Zealand, or that I don't get the change to study abroad. What will happen to my life then? What will happen, dear reader?
Well, since I spend all my day on a laptop, it probably makes sense to study a bachelors in Computer Science. Also, since I have a burgeoning curiosity for everything in the world people don't ask about, I should study philosophy too. So, CS + philosophy = AI Alignment; that's a close enough match for me. This means, being an AI researcher, I can work remotely! No stupid work commute for me. No stupid reason to live in Dhaka, the country's holy tech-place where all the development is concentrated in, when I can just work in an international AI firm and just join Zoom calls and stuff.
So, if I do choose remote work, that makes some of the remote parts of Bangladesh possible to live in, since I don't have to worry about job location. I was thinking of Sylhet although the city's people speaks a dialect of Bangla I'm not familiar in, and also they barely have any shit there. All the good shit—hospitals, companies, cafes, restaurants—are all in Dhaka and you all know how I feel about this piece of wreckage. Maybe one of those rich neighborhoods (more like townships) can be livable in Dhaka, but they're rare and need a lot of money. Also, less people = more safety in a sense, so going somewhere a bit remote seems okay-ish. I must keep many options, however. There is no such thing as a perfect home.
october 10th
I woke up at 5:40 AM today, even though I have an important exam today in the afternoon. I feel a bit tired now; I think I should've taken a nap in the morning. Oh well, I might take the nap during the car ride. Oh yeah, I'm just hoping I don't go to the exam with an empty stomach. I have a particular remembrance of an exam I took where I got hungry at the end, and I realized how biological and disrupting hunger is in an exam. I was just in the middle of proofreading my exam, and then BAAM, the hunger sets in and I'm like: 'I could really do a hamburger right now. Haven't had a burger for some time.'
Yeah, I just hope I don't get hungry at the exam venue, and I'm just going to pray to God that if hunger does settle in, I hope it does so at the end. Lunch hasn't been at all prepared in the house (Oh, how I wish I could control my food timings) and I'm thinking of just eating out right before the exam starts. Hey, what can someone do when they're hungry? Do complex organic synthesis questions or drool about hamburgers and feel that awful inanity in their stomach?
I'm grateful that I'm not poor, but I'm also not grateful that I'm not rich. Money, dear reader, is a very important thing, especially in South-east Asian countries like Bangladesh. It controls what education you'll likely have, what job you'll get, the people you'll see, how quickly you will die. It's funny how much power we gave to such an imaginary thing such as money. It's like the entire world is some funny surreal cartoon and no one really cares about what happens to someone else in the end.
october 11th
I'm wearing an old pair of glasses that I've never bothered to even touch, and I do have to say that glasses made of metal just have this elegant rich vibe. They probably last longer too. I just have a hunch.
It's funny that with just a simple change of glasses, I look vastly different than what I looked before. My previous glasses were plastic with thick frames that made me look like a librarian or some coder who reads books. My current pair of glasses are thinner and the frame is on the top of the lenses which honestly makes me scared. Really scared because breaking this shit would be a piece of cake (woah, I can't believe I used this idiom). Seriously though, I'm a bit scared because although it does look nicer it seems it'll break easier. Sorta goes against the metal-glasses-last-longer argument. I take my hunch back. Maybe both plastic and metal glasses last the same length of time.
I'm thinking about printing some eye charts, you know the one they have at the optometrist's office, in my room for something called 'active focus' which is supposed to make your myopia go away, or at least degrade the progression. Essentially you look at text that looks blurry to you and over time it becomes less blurry. You're apparently supposed to do this without glasses. I hope it helps.
Speaking of eye-care, I also recommend to spend some time in natural light for at least twenty minutes. Since I live in an apartment, the most I can do is in the balcony. It's sorta nice to look at all the blue light that comes at dawn. Is the blue-light something that only happens at Dhaka? Also, I'm trying to decrease my laptop screentime. Yeah, that's hard cause I'm contributing to it right now. The phone isn't a worry for me because I barely use mine.