I'm just a learning kid...

One other thing I realised during my trip back to Paris was that it is no longer my city... the memories I have of it keep it engraved within me as my city, but in the present reality that is no longer the case.

A French girl I met during my many meetings the other day asked me: "So, how do you feel - still French?" I replied: "More like a hybrid," and then I laughed along with her. By the way, that was my first ever 'inside joke'.

Hybrid... I like that term. In one word, you encapsulate the nature of something that could take a whole paragraph to explain. Well, not technically, but at least in a conversation.

I'm not sure you ever get used to the same questions people ask all the time, as if there is an innate need for most people to categorise you. This very need to categorise people all the time according to one's accent, nationality or skin colour is what makes it highly unlikely for the human race to ever stop being divisive.

I've been feeling down recently, but the sheer amount of work has kept the issues as to why I feel down slightly at bay.

So much to do... Having to prepare for my first 'business' trip in a foreign city I know nothing about, for instance, where I'll be expected to speak in fucking public about something I don't know in front of people who are expert in the subject.

Beyond that trip, which will really only give me time to check in and out of a hotel room, the workload has been piling up on my desk, and I just learned at the last minute that I'll be expected to write a two-page report on that trip. So, let's recap... I'm supposed to go off on my own to speak in public about something I don't know, and I'll have to write a report on this something I don't know as if I actually knew something about it. Great.

Well, if I can get out of this alive at least the silver lining is that I won't have to go anywhere else after that for a long time, so... It's more like a one-off, really.

In a way, I feel appreciated, in the sense that it's not often that someone who started so recently would be trusted to go to a formal event on behalf of the company... hence the stress, I suppose, because it puts extra pressure on me to do things right... but there is only so much I can do. I'm only human after all.

I realised something recently, just observing my mother. She's always been a practical person, a 'doer' in the sense that even her jobs were always physical rather than intellectual - although she was always ruthlessly logical in theory. There isn't much she couldn't do with her hands, for instance. More interestingly, there never seems to be a limit as to how much she can push herself physically, and she is even able to override physical pain to push herself further... almost like a machine at times.

I always thought that was one thing that I never got from her. I happen to be very clumsy in the physical world, with no physical strength and a complete inability to be practical in most things. But actually, we do share the same ability to push to the extreme... She always pushes herself physically and is able to do things no 'normal' or 'average' person would be able to, while I push myself mentally in exactly the same way.

How uncanny... We seem to have opposite characteristics yet the core is the same. She is the concrete, practical one, and I turned out to be the intellectual, abstract one. Perfect opposites, yet we both share the same trait of being able to push boundaries of our characteristics to the extreme.

If I look at how much she's been able to push herself, to the point of even overriding physical pain, it is as though I am in fact staring at an upside down reflection of my self. I do the same... pushing the boundaries of my mind. Looking at her is like the foretelling of things to come for me, in a way, except the effects will be different because she was always pushing her physical self, while I'm pushing my mind.

And I'm starting to realise why it is most people can't cope with our 'kind'... we simply can't be categorised. If anyone tries to compare themselves to us, they will be left behind panting and gasping for breath.

I ended up thinking at some point that I was quite slow at understanding things in general... but then a friend of mine laughed when I said that to her. She said: "Aliska... you think extremely fast compared to most people. You have no idea how much people are slow when they think."

Perhaps my mind is the equivalent of broadband internet while most remain on dial-up, I don't know. Anyway...

On a more personal level, it looks like I do have to get used to the fact that I'm riding solo in this life.