1/ Overtime Work#
Today is Sunday, theoretically a day off, but in reality not. Today we need to work overtime. Overtime means that we shouldn't be working today, but we have to. Why? Because in a few days, we will have a holiday, the May Day Labor Day holiday. However, the Labor Day holiday takes up two working days, so you need to make up for those two days from your holiday. We should still be grateful for the five-day holiday given to us. Because working overtime is just making up, not considered as regular work.
2/ Chaotic Video Editing#
Recently, I have been learning video editing, not to create outstanding videos, but to promote products on short video platforms. This is an attempt to earn extra income. I have always believed that video creation requires inspiration, such as when your video transitions, the style of the video, and what you want to convey, etc...
However, the videos I have been exposed to are not like that. The basic process is to splice ready-made materials together, add relevant captions, and then attach the desired products to be sold at the bottom of the video, and the promotional video is ready.
But these videos lack any technical content. Anyone familiar with editing software can complete them. My goal is simply to get viewers to buy the products and earn from referrals.
After a while, now or the day before yesterday, I have basically given up on editing videos. One reason is being busy, and the other important reason is that the videos I have posted have generated no income. This was a big blow to me. Of course, many friends told me that this is a probability issue, sometimes a random video can sell products, but sometimes even meticulously crafted videos struggle to gain views. I should persist for a while.
I am the kind of person who quickly loses interest. I know I have this flaw, so I plan to come back after the May Day holiday and persist for a while.
3/ Ten Years to Grow a Tree#
When I was young, I used to plant trees with my grandmother. She rode a tricycle, dragging a bundle of seedlings and carrying me. It took about fifteen minutes to ride from home to the field, passing through a forest and then arriving at the field. The planting area was a large pit with an approximately sixty-square-meter rectangular space. My grandmother told me that this land was cleared by your grandfather and me when we were young, and not many people have such land.
That piece of land was very far from the well, and in those days, it was mainly irrigated manually.
I remember my grandmother telling me, "The trees we are planting now are called poplar trees. Trees like these usually take ten or eight years to grow, to truly take root in the ground, to have leaves that block the sun and wind. We are now working hard to water them, protect them from being blown down by the wind, and prevent them from being eaten by sheep and pigs. In the future, these trees will protect our land from being blown away by the wind."
At that time, I was clueless, just playing around. Often when my grandmother asked me to help her fill the soil around the trees, she had to shout loudly for me to hear because grasshoppers and crickets were more interesting than planting trees.
Last autumn, when I drove past that piece of land, the trees had grown very tall. Probably about twenty meters, leaves connected to leaves, rustling in the wind. I knew that these trees had also understood what my grandmother said at the time: when they grow up, they must block the wind and protect the land.