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After parking my car and walking (or rather running) to the stadium, I bought my ticket and found a seat. Another game from Tehran’s League was being played and was within its final stages. It suddenly dawned upon me that perhaps my ticket was only valid for the game in progress and that I would have to leave after its conclusion. Looking at the size of the crowd and the difficulty of removing everyone, I reassured myself that the ticket was probably for both games. The worst scenario would be that I would have to leave the stadium in which case I would simply buy a ticket for the second game. The first game finally ended and everyone stayed put as Pas and Keshavarz entered the field and began their warmups. I already knew many of their players although this was the first time I was seeing them in person. I was seated on the side closer to Pas’s goal in the 1st half and as such witnessed Zarrincheh repeatedly charging down the flank only to overhit his cross. In one instance Keshavarz’...
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Mitra Azizirad is Corporate Vice President of AI and Innovation Marketing at Microsoft based in Seattle. A 27-year veteran of Microsoft, Mitra has held key leadership positions at Microsoft across a wide array of technical, marketing and sales functions, both in the field and corporate.  Mitra leads Microsoft’s vision to help individuals and organizations put AI into action to innovate, transform, and deliver lasting positive impact on people, industry, and society at large. " We all come from different backgrounds and experiences. I have mixed Iranian and Scottish heritage and I’m proud to live my values openly.  After Microsoft, I'm totally leaving the industry to do art. I've already had offers to decorate my co-workers' houses, so I could do that, or design or be a fashion illustrator. "  
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Kurt finally made it to his apartment and stepped into the barely lit corridor. Walking towards his apartment he spotted a silhouette in the distance. With every step more details were uncovered, yet still not enough to give away the identity. Kurt kept his eyes on the face wondering if he could solve this meaningless game of clue until he reached a point where he accepted defeat. It was only then that he realized the lady approaching him had caught his stare and was staring back just as hard, perhaps playing the same game. As they were about to pass one another Kurt gently nodded his head and was faced by the same reaction by her. He mumbled a weak hi as they passed and thought he heard the same from her.  But after a few more steps she suddenly called back at Kurt, “Oh I’m sorry, I think I confused you with someone else.” Kurt glanced at her briefly and continued his march to his apartment. “Just because you don’t know me didn’t mean you had to take your hello back, jerk,” he tho...
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Two years ago, Arsalan Saleh Fard had never heard of this Latin American metropolis. He would have been lost if asked to identify it on a map. But it is here, at times sleeping on a mattress on the floor, where the Iranian-born Saleh Fard was living a life in limbo. With no legal right to work and no permanent place to stay, the 25-year-old picked up under-the-table shifts at a barbershop to pay for his insulin injections and rent. He arrived knowing no Spanish and had picked up only a few phrases by earlier this year. Virtually all his in-person conversations, he said, came translated through a translation app on his phone. “I don’t know what to do,” he said in a June interview in Farsi, his native tongue, speaking to The Washington Post via an interpreter. “I am really lost here.” Saleh Fard, who was among the very first migrants deported to a nation he didn’t know, has spent longer in a third country than virtually anyone else. After he was sent to Panama by the U.S., the Panamanian...
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I remember years ago I had to drive a friend of mine who was heavily into substance abuse t a clinic to get clean. She was very opposed but thankfully couldn't put up much of a fight because she was cooked out of her mind on the way there. It was when we finally got there that it dawned upon her what was happening and she voiced her objection. "I don't need this." "Yeah you're fine."  "I don't need to go." "Stop whining." "I don't belong in there."  "You sleep an hour a night for like the last 3 months."  "I don't need to go."  "You're only going to be there for 2 months."  "I don't need this, you know I don't need this. Look at me, I'm fine."  "I'm doing it for your own good babe, I promise you. It's like school. You just got out of school like 6 months ago. It's like a year. It's like you were on a holiday for a year. It's okay. It...
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"It doesn't matter to me. I don't care if I know him and I don't care if I don't,"says T.J. Houshmandzadeh of his father. "At the end of the day, if I had done that to my kids, would I want to get to know them? Yeah, I would. But I wouldn't expect them to put the effort in. They know of me, but they don't know me. You chose to leave. I didn't choose to be born. If I get to know him, cool. But I'm not going to put in the effort. I don't call people back when they call me." Houshmandzadeh talked to his father for the first time this past summer, making the call to Iran, but he's not making any appointments for another one. His uncles liked the original Touraj, a college student when he met their sister, and over the years have encouraged him to reach out. "His dad was a nice man; he treated my sister well," Anthony Norman says. "He got called back to Iran. He had to go. His dad got sick. He wanted my sister to go ...
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In the early 2000s I made an attempt to learn Spanish. This was largely as a result of playing with and coaching a group of mostly Spanish speaking players. What little Spanish I learned before giving up on it I tried to use in everyday conversations. One day at work when I expressed that a girl I found hot was "mucho caliente" a coworker told me that I was saying it wrong and I really should say "muy caliente". I insisted that I was saying it correctly. He clarified that the way it said it was like saying in English that something was "a lot of hot". I indicated that I regularly called things a lot of hot in English.  
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Five years after join­ing Toronto Fire in March 2017, Edward Aza­deh tried to end his life, haunted by all that he had seen as a first respon­der, and by the dis­crim­in­a­tion he says he suffered because he is gay. “I came to Toronto Fire Ser­vices full of joy, con­fid­ence and health,” says Aza­deh.  He was drawn to the pro­fes­sion by the pro­spect of help­ing oth­ers. Sev­en­teen months after his sui­cide attempt, Aza­deh is still strug­gling — phys­ic­ally and men­tally. After he emerged from a med­ic­ally induced coma, it took him months to relearn how to eat and walk. He has been dia­gnosed with depres­sion and post-trau­matic stress dis­order (PTSD) and is unable to work. He can’t drive. He lives alone in a small, tidy apart­ment. The med­ic­a­tions he has been pre­scribed to calm his racing mind have left him with a speech imped­i­ment, for which he often apo­lo­gizes. “I find myself a shell of the man I was,” says Aza­deh. Aza­deh has filed a com­plaint against City of To...
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Back in the early 2000s one of my coworkers approached me with some photographs of her dogs and asked me if I wanted to see her puppies. The surprised look on my face and hesitance to answer made another coworker begin laughing out loud as she realized that I (and her) were wrestling fans and as such took her comment to mean something completely different. When another coworker heard of our exchange she said, "And you probably responded YES YES YES!!" The coworker who laughed passed away a few years later.  
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They both got up, paid their bill and headed towards the door.   A young lady approached from the other side, stole a quick glance and focused on a distant spot ahead of her.   Kurt had become very familiar with the procedure, the classic I-see-you-are-deformed-so-I’ll take-a-quick-look-out-of-curiousity-but-will-immediately-look-away-as-you-are-hidious-and-I-don’t-want-you-to-catch-me-staring-at-your-freek-face-so-I’ll-focus-on-whatever-is-straight-ahead-of-me-and-act-like-that-was-my-intention-all-along-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-your-face look.   She walked past them.   “Bitch,” Kurt mumbled.  
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