New Year, New Variant (Sigh)

[Pic credits: google/slothilda.com]

Getting up from bed this morning & grabbing some nice eggs for breakfast was surprisingly easy. I am excited for the new years and (new?) beginnings. As I sat reflecting on the absurdity of starting another year at 2022 coz 2021 left me a bit shellshocked and vaccinated, yet here I am - greeting 2022 with a mixture of hope and cautious dread for yet another Covid variant. They say “Omicron,” but it might as well be “Oh, make one more lockdown.”

Yet even as the world seems to dance on a tightrope, I can’t help but crack a smile at the silly side of it: I joke that I have more face-masks lined up than cocktails at a party. I probably swore I’d never turn into a complete homebody, but here I am: cozying up in my PJs with my houseplant named “Signal Strength,” because in 2022, that’s just about our main connection.

Every morning I glance at the news on my iPad (looking out to the nice green patch of garden from my huge windows ) and wonder if I’m living in an alternate reality. NASA’s latest telescope image is so sharp that Mars seems closer than my flight home. Meanwhile, Singapore is talking about Covid restrictions, and I’m here refreshing a portal to check if there are any new travel restrictions. It’s like a glitchy ’90s video game – just when you think you’ve beaten the level, a new boss battle of bureaucracy appears. My fam back in Bhubaneswar is already worried about settling down in life (again), and I try to convince her (in my head ofcourse!) that AI bots will be hot very soon. She’s not thrilled.

On the tech front, everyone talks about “the metaverse” and “Web3” like we’re living in Blade Runner, but I can’t even get my Mac to recognize my fingerprint sometimes. If I had a nickel for every time someone said “soon we’ll have flying cars,” I could fund my own startup. I’ve been dabbling in Python (not the snake, but the language), and it feels like teaching an old dog new tricks: slow but eventually gratifying. Still, there’s optimism: we shot rockets to the moon, launched vaccines in record time, and I’m sure humanity will figure out this Covid mess eventually – maybe with a healthy dose of sarcasm and more handshake robots than we realize. So here’s to 2022: may it be the year the AI gods give us a break (or at least some good Wi-Fi - the extender to my room sucks!).