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Category: ostalo

The Story of Grandmother

Today my dad told me how neither my brother nor I cried a lot when grandma died. I was shocked at first, but giving it a second thought, I think it’s because grandma was largely a mystery to me. So today I decided to tell her story, the way it was told and retold to me. The story begins sometime during World War ||. The birthplace of my grandma, a small Mediterranean island, falls under Italian occupation. She and her family are forced to flee and are transferred to a refugee camp in Egypt. There she meets a young, wounded…

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Computer Science Barbie aka Fake It til You Make It

The best career advice I ever got was: Fake it ’til you make it. I don’t remember the name of the lady who said that, it was at an Amazon internal conference a few years back, but here is a public thank you to that amazing woman. My entire life I had felt like I wasn’t good enough. No matter how well I was doing in life, I always felt it wasn’t deserved. The fact that I was a woman in a man’s industry and working at some very hostile environments did not help that feeling. I realized that no matter…

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Peter and Me

It’s been three days since Peter went missing. The police came to question me today. – Please call us if you think of anything else – the inspector said as he was handing me his business card. I told him I couldn’t do that as I didn’t own a phone. – Not even a cellphone? I told him I had never gotten one of those things. Too much radiation. – How do you communicate with family? Friends? – he insisted. I shook my head, indicating I didn’t have any. I told him if it was something urgent, I’d write a…

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The Changing Painting

It’s been three months since that dreadful night and this is the first time I’m telling the full story to anyone. You might think I’m crazy or simply a bad person. Either way – your opinion is entirely up to you. * * *  Having assessed the situation, I figured it would be a while before I get a chance to talk to Joanne. My remaining option was to make a lap on my own. Most of the paintings looked the same to me; line over line, curves, some neon colors. Until one completely caught my attention. It was a…

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Who, Who Are You?

Last night I talked to a friend who is on a job hunt. A lot of his self image comes from being an engineer and being between jobs made him feel like he lost that particular part of himself. It made me think – why do we identify so much of who we are based on the job we’re doing? I ran a little experiment; I browsed a bunch of profiles of people I’m following on Twitter, reading their bio. Unsurprisingly, for most of them the bio usually starts with “position X @ company Z”. More often than not, it…

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