Don’t get me wrong. I am not writing this because I think I am special.

It is just an obsession of mine. I want to find out what living abroad for the past 26 years has done to my brain.

Apparently, I am more likely than other people to be able to use a box of tacks as a candle holder.

According to studies conducted by William Maddux, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and Adam Galinsky, Professor of Ethics and Management at the Kellogg School, living abroad and creativity are tightly connected.

MBA students at the Kellogg School were asked to solve the famous Duncker candle problem. Results showed that the longer students had spent living abroad the more likely they were to find a creative solution.

The university also ran a second test on them involving the mock sale of a gas station. Again, those students who had lived abroad were more likely to reach a deal that demanded a creative approach.

Vacations don’t count. Only living abroad leads to creativity.

Maddux and Galinsky found out that the more students had adapted to foreign cultures when they lived abroad, the more creative they turned out to be.

So, you see, it is worth enduring being called a foreigner a million times or having to eat the worst food ever (this was in Eastern Europe a long time ago).

Pay-back time eventually comes.

Tacks and candles are high on my shopping list for the weekend.

“You speak five languages, you must be hungry…”

Our guest Xiuwei made dumplings for me this weekend.

Coming from a family that was never quite sure about the exact location of the kitchen in the house, I am always extremely grateful when my friends cook for me.

Xiuwei’s remark got me thinking…. while I was chewing my dumplings.

Is it true that if you speak different languages you get hungrier than other people? Have you ever noticed that?

Is the internet altering your sense of time?

I had an interesting conversation with Vassiliki this morning who is doing research at the University of Patras in Greece about communication ethics and the web.

As a child, I was obsessed with the concept of time.

Time felt so artificial and I was sure that it wasn’t real.

I even started writing a book about a group of people who had managed to live outside time. They lived in a big baroque villa on a cliff overlooking a stormy sea. The tile of the book was La Casa delle Bambole (the doll house). I never finished it. I showed it to someone who found it way too weird… and that was it.

Vassiliki and I were wondering whether a new type of time is surfacing and governing our interactions on the web… from how quickly we respond to comment on a blog to how often we update our mood on Facebook.

Is the fact that we are constantly in touch with people in other time zones expanding our perception of time?

Time to take up my childhood project again.

Photo: thanks to timerecorders.co.uk

Thanks to Facebook, I might have a past after all.

You have probably read the article in the Jan issue of Fortune predicting the end of Facebook and the rise of new players set to expand the utility of the web (which ones? The author doesn’t really say).

I don’t care. Facebook just made my week.

While I was leaving home for an icy walk to the Tube station on Saturday morning, I got a Facebook message from my friend Melania. I had not seen or heard from her in 32 years!

Melania and I used to spend the summer in the same Kinderheim on the Adriatic Sea, where our parents would park us to our great delight (I really mean it!).

I could not believe my eyes. I would have hugged my Blackberry. I was so happy!

I just got back part of my life thanks to Facebook. Melania’s message got me thinking…

It is a great service Facebook and other social networking sites are doing to people like me, who spent most of their lives moving around the world and, as a result, have lost contact with their childhood friends.

Me being me…I have already started analysing the feelings that come from having found Melania again.

Here are some:
•It is as if something that was interrupted a long time ago would start spinning again…like a planet that got stuck in its orbit
•Old memories are coming back like pastel colours on a canvass
•The dizziness I sometimes feel riding the Tube through London has subsided…is it because I now have Facebook roots?

When I worked as a journalist, I used to hate press conferences.

All you usually got was the party line. If you wanted real news that would give an edge to your article, you had the corner the person at the end…and sometimes risk to be thrown out of a window.

It happened to me at the press conference of a Czech bank…it was a beautiful summer day in Prague and the CEO and I were standing next to a window. He happened not to like my question.

But watching this video has restored my faith in press conferences. Seeing George Bush dodging the shoe…was real action.

This is what I would call a real press conference.

I got my wish.

The weather in Italy was wonderful. The unseasonably warm sun mixed with the autumn colours gave the place a surreal glow. I wasn’t sure of where I was…

But I was there, in my mother’s hospital room, looking out at the soft hills of Valpolicella.

My mother is learning to breathe again. So I spent the weekend scanning my brain for everything I could remember about pranayama and doing yoga exercises with her.

Sitting there with mother in silence made me think of the early days after her accident and of how I was able to communicate with her in a manner that was only marginally verbal.

I don’t exactly know how I did it and what else I was using, apart from a few words, but it worked. It really worked.

I am intrigued. Do we focus too much on words? Is there a way to consciously concentrate on other elements of our communication with people and allow them to get stronger?

Barriers in cross-cultural communication are often built by the words we use. So if we were to use other elements, we wouldn’t be building those barriers….

Imagine how much progress we would make in difficult situations like peace negotiations…

This thought came to me while I was reading in an Italian newspaper about Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and UN mediator, winning the Nobel Price.

I heard him speak in Sweden years ago. He said something that really sums up my life so well: “I have a very large family. I meet a new member of my family every day”.

Photo: thanks to graphics.jsonline.com

I am going to escape from London tonight.

What I am trying to escape from is all the talk of financial gloom and doom that has been following me everywhere this week..…even at my hairdresser’s.

I heard a joke last night at a function. It’s apparently a Chinese joke: “There is no point in economising on candles if the result is twins”….

I am not sure I get the connection with the financial crisis.

May be, my jet-lag and staying up all night to watch the candidates debate has made me a little dense.

I will be flying to Italy for the weekend… where they still believe that the banking crisis is only happening in America…

Who said that ignorance isn’t bliss???

I almost forgot…but it has really been 25 years.

I was negotiating Blackfriars bridge on my high hills last night on the way to a function when it dawned on me… I have been living abroad for a quarter of a century.

On September 19th, 1983, my father packed his old Citroën with my boxes and drove me to Austria where I was to begin my studies at the University of Innsbruck.

I remember falling asleep immediately after we left the house and waking up when we were already deep into the Alps.

That’s when I realised that I was living home and my old life for good.

The thought didn’t frighten me. I felt the mountains embracing me and lifting me up. I knew they would be looking after me.

Innsbruck is so beautiful in the spring.

A fellow student from Nigeria used to say that when you walk by the river Inn, the beauty of the mountains overwhelms you and you feel your heart bursting.

It is pictures like this that were going through my mind last night on Blackfriars bridge.

An overwhelming collection of faces, words, sunsets, snowfall, books, planes, hugs, etc. that have made up the past 25 years. They have all morphed into a body of memories and ultimately into who I am today.

The interesting thing is that even the less happy memories (like all the times I have been called a foreigner….) have been swallowed by that body and transformed into something I would have never wanted to miss.

And guess what… the sun is shining today in London, same as that day in the Alps.

There was this cartoon character when I was growing up in Italy. A Native American who used to sit on a large stone in the middle of the Arizona desert.

A feather stuck to the back of his head, he would spend his days writing. The bubble above his head said endlessly “Scribble, scribble, scribble….” That was apparently the noise his quill made on the paper (from the Italian scrivere for writing).

And Scribble Scribble was the nickname my father gave me at some point during my school years. I would spend hours in my room writing.

I had this inexplicable urge to write.

May be it is because of my family. They all used to write. My great-grandfather wrote so much in his job and free time that he got terrible cramps. The pain made him unable to work and my grandfather had to support him.

Sometimes, when I look at my right hand, I see my great-grandfather’s, I feel the pain shooting up my arm and I hear his voice saying “Write, Silvia, write, write all the things I couldn’t write….”.

Yes, the act of writing does hold an enormous fascination over me.

No wonder I couldn’t stop listening to my friend Tom last week. He was describing the trance he puts himself into every time he writes with a fountain pen.

“Once the nib is worn in, the pen is not scratchy any more, ” he told me. “Your thoughts flow much better than if you were writing on a keyboard. A keyboard stops you”.

Tom also told me that sometimes the trance gets so deep that it becomes an intense physical experience.

Writing is certainly an intense experience.

At the moment, I am spending days working on my book on international PR.

It is just me, my ideas, my notes and my computer. My entire being is focused on producing what I want to say and the number of words I have to write.

Like Tom, I get so deep into my writing ….and my mind….

Would somebody rescue me?

Photo: thanks to lifehack.org

I had a shorter birthday this year.

I was flying home from the US on Monday morning. When I landed at Gatwick, I realised that half of the day was gone and time had stolen part of my birthday…

I imagined part of me being stuck between the folds of time, for ever celebrating my birthday in the middle of the ocean.

I closed my eyes and saw a spectacular creature emerge from the deep of the Atlantic and take a bite at my birthday…a marine Grinch…

So how can I get half of my birthday back???

And if I don’t, does that make me younger ???

Who knows?

I did have a wonderful birthday once I landed.

Many thanks to those of you who sent me flowers, post cards, e-mails, Facebook messages, text messages and thanks for all your phone calls.

You made my short birthday very special!

I was attacked by the birthday Grinch on my way back from Texas. I attended IABC’s leadership institute in San Antonio last week. My fellow IABC executive board member Felicia and I gave a presentation on how to use professional development to grow membership. We had a great audience.

It was nice and warm in San Antonio and I didn’t really feel like leaving on Sunday…

Texas with its huge open spaces intrigues me.

So I thought I would take a piece of Texas back with me to keep me company on the plane. I bought No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. The movie is superb… but the dialogues in the book are even better.

And yes, it does feel like being back in Texas, definitely!

Photo: thanks to digital-photography-school.com