This Week's Excuse

Happy girls make good girls.
I am not happy, therefore it's so HARD to be a good girl.
Anna's right. I have to make MYSELF happy.

I'd like to hang out more and "have fun," but all that is on my mind is to get peace of mind with work. I so desperately want to become SOMEbody, and to hurry up and get really good at what I want to do right now--reporting. I want to be able to file a good story, look good doing it and be praised. I think that is why I keep working and working and working. The problem is that I'm working as a one girl team, and I'm having a problem finding a point of reference. My desk with the English news team is three floors away from the other reporters, so I can't see what real reporters do and how they do it (at least while they are in the office). No one has the same aspirations as myself down here, so there's no one to run with. It's like running a marathon through the mountains on your own--very boring and tiring, and you also have to navigate yourself, which in my case has been very inefficient, because I'm trying to continue running at full speed and navigate at the same time. Here's another analogy: it's like driving and reading a map at the same time--you either go on the big roads and take a long time, or run into a tree while trying to read the tiny lines on the map, searching for a short cut.

I must PLAN. Plan plan plan! I must be organized! I must put to use the thinking skills I gained from college and graduate school. Gosh, I feel dumb.

The dumb girl, however, may have some charisma, though. I charmed Softbank's CEO, Masayoshi Son (孫正義), into giving me an exclusive interview yesterday. He turned down all the other print and TV media in Taiwan. Like my producer and also my godmother said, "smile, and ask them what they want to talk about first."

I guess I still remember how to smile, a little.

A big thank-you to Father for helping me come up with questions to a just-get-him-to-say-something assignment.

I feel better now. I need more chances to charm people. Plan plan plan! Perhaps I will plan more special interviews. Our audience seems to like business and politics a lot.

This week's excuse for not hanging out: Masayoshi Son