Taking a quick break before I pull my first 10 or 11 pm-er.
Just because I’ve cinched my dream job and now write for a living, doesn’t mean I plan to cheat on my blog by posting lousy (but immensely cute) animal pictures all the time to pass off as actual posts ( I know i’m not fooling anyone..)
So now, almost a month into the job and the well-wishes have tapered off, I’m ready to talk about it. At this opportune moment when I’m drowning in lines and words.
I don’t think I’ve ever used the word ‘joy’ ever. I avoid it like those pesky credit card salesmen but it’s exactly what my job has been giving me. Joy.
I have no right to rue no longer seeing sunlight when I leave the office, because I chose this and hey, I don’t mind it one bit. There was never a time when I glamourised this choice so I thankfully suffer no illusions of what is demanded of me (and my googling skills). Staying till 8, 9, 10pm is fine, that means avoiding dinner/social appointments and saving money, which us poor journos don’t see much of. Waking up before the sun rises to complete an article is fine too, the silence has proven revelatory to work, one less time of hitting the snooze button teaches me discipline (riiight…) and I get to make my own breakfast!
Now, for the people. Of course, I don’t mean my fellow occupants of the newsroom but my interview subjects and the people I have had to interact with.
Let’s put this bluntly – I left PR because I can’t be fake-nice and I don’t want to beg people and be at a (more often than not, dumb) client’s whims and fancies – and it’s true, I don’t have to be all those anymore.
At the risk of sounding conceited, it amuses me to experience first hand how quickly and efficiently people react when they hear the publication’s name. Things get done so much faster, voices get a notch chirpier and people just cannot be rude to you. Of course, unfortunately this doesn’t omit singlish. PR people who use singlish… why why why? And, are you sure you want to??
Of course, it’s not easy to get conceited when your boyfriend calls the publication ‘fascist’ and came very close to not getting the first issue my name was published in. It’s easy to love an ego-stroker but so much more rewarding (in a masochistic way, of course) to seek the love of an esteem-basher haha!
On to my interview subjects, and I can’t speak for my colleagues of course, but I’ve had general good luck with cooperation and newsworthiness. The bonus, of which I’ve been lucky enough to experience these two days with two very different women, is having fun and turning it into a conversation rather than Q&A session. The effect these two ladies had on me is inexplicable, one was shy and soft-spoken but had so much to say about her craft and the other was attractive, eloquent, held herself with elegance and was so knowledgeable about a diverse amount of things. The best thing was my curiosity for so many things were piqued after the interviews and well, so many things to wiki, so little time.
Of course, one might argue that I’m just new and naive and wide-eyed at everything but I maintain that being genuine and possessing the magnetic quality that draws people like moths to light, as my elegant interviewee had, is not something that can be bought with money or title. I’m by no measure a social butterfly but meeting and speaking to such people can really brighten up my day.
Apart from learning from other people, I have also had grounding learning experiences from myself – such as I can’t seem to ever do a 50 word summary well (this is really depressing…) and to erase the flouncey, flowery bullshit style that is PR writing that has been ingrained in me and to do it news-style and so much more. I never denied that this would be a valuable learning experience but it’s turning out to be much more eye-opening than I thought…
Alright, back to churning out four digit word counts!
p.s proof that a happy journalist is an anomaly :)
