Amrest Chinkamol

อมเรศ ชินกมล /(am·ma·reːt chin·ga·mon)/

Hail from the edge of Bangkok Interestingly, many residents of Bangkok seem to be in the dark about the location of the Buengkum district – some even wonder if it truly exists at all. where the city’s non-stop energy vibrates under jam-packed skies alongside a semi-functional public transit.

My story started in a High-Performance Computing and Networking Laboratory. Surrounded by servers and computers humming louder than the city’s constant traffic mayhem (essential for keeping them from turning into expensive heatersIt’s about as useful to us as a snowblower in the Sahara. ), my path veered unexpectedly.

The culprit?

A persuasive senior who, after a casual inquiry about internship opportunities, steered me into the world of health informatics. So here I am, navigating the labyrinth of health data, as complex and unpredictable as Bangkok’s famed traffic. And the punchline? That guy literally sent me to an institution smack in the middle of a forest, a veritable ‘nowhere’ – talk about going off the grid to study the grid as a former grid computing student! ⊕
Sattellite image of Nowhere, Google Maps, 2023.

What a jokester.

Why the f*ck is it spelled ‘Amrest’?

In the hands of my elementary school English teacher, a linguistic adventurer of sorts, my name took a whimsical turn. He swung for the fences in spelling and landed on ‘Amrest’ – a mark so far from the original, it circled back to being right. The blend of my youthful innocence and the byzantine bureaucracy the State enforce onto my childhood sealed its fate. ‘Amrest’ found its way onto every official document, holding my true identity captive forever since.

I have become ‘Amrest’ – a living typo. Literally.

Well, other ‘‘Amrests’’ do existIn multiple forms. They treated us like linguistic guinea pigs – Amres, Amred, Amaret, and many others – apparently, Helsinki Declaration doesn’t cover our cases. , but they’re few and far between. I’ve met a few, and we all share the same story. We’re all victims of some outlandish self-proclaimed linguistic adventurers.

I’ve grown to accept it as my own. It’s a part of me now, and I’m not letting it go.