Sorry for the delay on writing these, it wasn't until I started to really look at these that I realized that I hadn't written one of them for a while. I'll try to keep up because I finally realized how to make it possible on my phone. Either way, here's episode 100 of This American Life, and what I would add to it.
When I was growing up, I didn't buy my own music until I was 17. . . or maybe even 18. It wasn't until Kazza that I really started to pick up my own music taste, but for the most part, I had my radio.
While growing up, my radio wasn't only my step in bed time story reader, but also the thing that I listened to for the majority of an entire day once a week. My family was good Mormons, and so on Sundays we were trying to keep the Sabbath day holy, which meant no TV, no friends, not much of anything, so I would listen to NPR the ENTIRE day. I would wake up and listen to Sunday's Morning Edition, and it would keep going late into the night. Depending on the day I would even keep it running through the late night jazz and into the BBC broadcasts that start super late at night. Throughout my entire Sunday I would listen to Car Talk, The Prairie Home Companion, This American Life, and all of the other shows that would come through the NPR back at home. It was because of those days that I am writing this. The reason that I'm okay enough to write 100 episodes of My American Life, is because for a long time, these were the episodes that I listened to on Sundays.
These episodes weren't just me trying to keep the air filled with something more than The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, they were a way for me to see the world outside of my teenage home. The thing about the radio, or at least the radio that I listened to for all of that time, was that the radio was voices of a world that I wanted to be part of. It was educated, it was interesting, it looked at the world in a way that I never even thought was possible. That's the thing about these radio shows, is that for the most part you had your news stories in some of them, a bit of political in others, but then there were programs like This American Life, and Prairie Home Companions and it wasn't just news, it was stories. It was the art of story telling.
The radio, when it was airing those shows, wasn't just airing something that I would forget about in the next week, it was a story that I wanted to listen to, and I"m a sucker for a good story. I like stories. I like getting wrapped up into a story about something that gets me out of my life, because let's admit the facts right now, life sucks. Life is never where you want to be, you always want to be somewhere else, worrying about something else, and not having to deal with your own problems, and story radio (not news radio, because that's just angry people yelling at each other) was my place to get those stories and to see a world outside of constantly being grounded, and also the start of my brain thinking that I possibly had something that I could write about as well.
That was the other thing that the radio was for me, it was my entertainment.
As a teenager, I was often in trouble. Let me correct that, I was always in trouble. I didn't like being bossed around, I thought I was smarter than everyone, and I just didn't like it, which meant that more often than not I was in trouble. Being in trouble meant I wasn't allowed to watch the TV, I wasn't allowed to play on the computer, and there was no way that I"d be able to visit my friends, so I had a few things to keep me entertained, books and my stereo. To this day, that's what keeps me entertained, books (or at least stories of some sort or another) and my stereo. My stereo has been upgraded to my laptop with podcasts and internet radio, but the combo is the same. Because I was constantly in trouble, I didn't go out and do things because I was stuck at home listening to my radio. Radio wasn't just a place to listen to the top 40, it was a place for me to go instead of my friend's house because I couldn't. Radio, to me, was, and is, something of importance, and a great form of entertainment because you don't get stuff like this anywhere else.
Radio is one of the weirdest things, because it's nothing but sound. You never know who a person actually is, you only have their voice to work off of. From that one voice, from their inflections, their speed, their pace, and the vocabulary they use, you start to make an image of who you think they are. I have listened to This American Life for years now, and I still can not tell you what the host looks like. I can spot his voice from a mile away and can tell you exactly who he is if I hear him, but I couldn't pick him out of a crowd if there was a gun to my head. That's the weirdest part of the radio medium, it's personal to the point where I feel like I know these people. I feel like I know Ira, his family, his pets, his likes and dislikes, but at the same point I know nothing about him.
Radio, is also the home of creative non-fiction. The personal essay, the profile piece, the best writing that I love to read now all comes from the radio.
I've tried to fix up this post and really try to understand what it is about the radio that I love so much, but for as old as it is, and as weird as it seems, I'm going to be listening to radio stories until the day I die, because it is the chance of getting to be able to listen to a story instead of having to read it, and that is an amazing thing.
