In similar shoes

This is my coworker who is in a similar position as me. She is Hakka and going through the same pains as me to learn Taiwanese in order to present in Taiwanese. Normally, she's the morning news anchor and does noontime news on the weekends. Our MD is either crazy or has a lot of faith in us. Here's Sharfren's story: http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/jw!xivo8ISBGBYLhZJ1lHmP0ocJQc8-/article?mid=1592&prev=-1&next=1548

Falling apart

I lost it today. I lost my temper and was very rude to my boss. Unfortunately, I was the one who was completely wrong this time. It's not an anger management problem. It's a stress management problem. Must de-stress. I don't think I've had so much acne before, not even during middle school. One more day, and it makes 9 days on shift. After that, another 12 straight days, with a day of Taiwanese anchoring somewhere in there. Never have I felt so much pressure before. If I can make it through in one piece, I don't think I have much else to be afraid of. Not for a while at least.

Everyday in the next two weeks, I must:
1. practice Taiwanese
2. practice de-stressing
3. go to bed before 22h30

Good night and please pray for me.

Debut

I made my live Mandarin newscasting debut yesterday! I never knew I could be so nervous to wake up with almost 20 pimples on my face. It didn't go that well, but I think it was passing.

First I did the 1100 China Airlines news, then the 1400 cable news. CI news went OK. I did it for four days about a year ago, so I was somewhat familiar, though still a little nervous. The associate producer (AP) told me I needed to smile a little more. I was so nervous I forgot to do that. So I kept it in mind for the 1400 news.

The 1400 news was quite different - it was a full hour of news, something like 30-40 stories, where CI was about 15 stories plus a BBC segment. I didn't manage time properly and couldn't get through all the scripts before heading into the studio.

When I did the CI news last year, political stories were hard for me because I didn't know the political scene well. This time, it was the baseball stories that nearly killed me. It was a huge MLB day and about a quarter of the stories were on baseball. Two or three of them were anchor scripts, which mean I read and read and read forever. I wasn't familiar with the terminology or the people, so it was so so so difficult! I paused in the wrong places, even read one of the team names wrong (I don't know half the teams' names in Chinese) and it was just a nightmare!

After 8 stories, I thought I was going to faint. I thought the commercial break would never come. Eventually, it did, and while the program director yelling that my pauses were a HUGE problem, I zoomed through the stories coming up in the next block and prepared for the worst.

Thankfully, blogs two through four were much shorter, which bought me a little more time to go through stories in the next block, but GOSH, was it scary!! Chinese is no joke for me! I almost had a nervous breakdown in there. I still can't believe I survived.

If you saw it, now you know why I looked so grave.

I can't believe they want me to do Taiwanese news next weekend. My Taiwanese is not even up to conversational level. This is not funny. I'm going to DIE.