Livin’ the Dream

As a kid, I thought it would be really cool to be on the radio. In fact, I have a cassette tape somewhere in this house o’ boxes of mine that has me pretending to be a radio DJ. Both sides of the 90-minute tape are filled with music and my witticisms.

While I went to college with the intention of becoming a radio or television newscaster, I got sidetracked into newspaper journalism somewhere along the way (probably because I could relate to the students on the university’s newspaper staff more than the AV geeks who worked in the television studio and the pot-smoking metal heads at the radio station).

While I have loved my career as a newspaper reporter (got a couple of hours? I have stories about covering the police beat that will make you wonder about how some people even make it through the day) and editor, I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that perhaps I should pursue something on the radio.

To sum up the last three years or so, I worked toward that goal and just got a job doing the news on a pretty well-known radio station on the weekends. Perhaps I was distracted by having to get up at 4 a.m. on Saturdays and 5 a.m. on Sundays (yup, this night owl has been seeing early morning from a whole new angle). Or maybe I was too nervous about getting the timing down, hitting the right buttons and trying to sound like I knew what I was doing. Nevertheless, it took two weeks for it to hit me.

Finally, two years after taking a different radio job, eight years after graduating from college, 12 years from going to college to study journalism, 20 years after I made that tape… I’m finally doing what I’ve always wanted to do. And I don’t think it gets much better than that.