Nearly 30 years ago, I handed my father’s watch to a professional watchmaker for a routine service.
When I came back for it, he put it on the counter and said nothing. And to my horror, the crystal was shattered. The hands were missing. The dial was scratched, the case bent. Irreparably damaged, he told me.
I was twenty years old.
I’m 14, and I’ve already chosen what to do the rest of my life. Next year, the Tunisian educational system will ask me to pick a stream: maths, science or literature.
Nobody needs to ask. It’s maths, because maths leads to engineering school, and engineering school leads to computers.
I know nothing about salaries, job markets or what a software engineer does all day. But all I know is that it’s the path to follow to my dream job.
I owned one car on this list, a Renault Twingo, and the rest I’ve only ever wanted, carried in my head since I was a kid.
What they share is a shape you can sketch from memory and a reason to exist beyond getting from one place to another. They’re mostly from before 2000, and I could blame nostalgia for that, but I think the reason is more boring, because after 2000 aerodynamic optimisation and safety regulation pushed the whole industry towards the same optimal shape, so the cars got better and got harder to tell apart.
“True friends are never apart, maybe in distance but never in heart.”
— Helen Keller
Friendships don’t always end with fights. Sometimes they just fade, without drama, without closure. One day they’re there. The next, they are just names in your phone.
I’ve been wondering how to celebrate this milestone. Because yeah… today marks exactly 20 years since I hit “publish” on my very first blog post — April 18th, 2005.
That post? Honestly… it was bad. A clumsy “hi”, a confused tone, and zero clue about where I was heading. It was a start.
But hey… here we are. Twenty years later.
Still blogging. Still writing — even if what that means has changed a lot over time.
I guess it’s time for a little reflection.
So there I was, 8 years old, dragged to the shopping center by my dad because, apparently, shopping for socks is a family event. We’re walking through this temple of consumerism when—BAM!—I spot a computer showroom. Not just any computers. MSX/Sakhr machines .