Years ago I sat in a meeting, the youngest at the table by at least 15 years, and listened to the people around me talk about National Public Radio (NPR). I sat and quietly listening, knowing better than to mentioned my favorite radio stations that kept me up to date on boom-boom, bubblegum and the like. At some point a woman sitting across from me noticed the slightly glazed look on my face.
“You don’t listen to NPR, do you?”
“Nope,” I said.
“That’s because you’re young. We’re old.”
Hey, she said it; not me. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure I even knew what NPR was before that. In retrospect, I know that my dad was and is an avid listener of NPR because he likes the music on it. But other than that…
As I’ve aged, I’ve heard more and more of my friends talking about NPR. I rejected them these friends and their old-people-radio ways. Then Wonder Boy started quoting it.
(Technically, he is out of the range of my three-year age limit by about three months and maybe those few months make all the difference.)
When I say Wonder Boy was quoting NPR, I don’t think it paints the full picture. In just about every (intellectual) conversation I take part in I end up saying something like, “Well, I read this one thing in the New Yorker…” Occasionally I will reference Time Magazine, but I consider that to be a pretty fluffy source of news so I am much more likely to city the much revered New Yorker. Over time Wonder Boy essentially started throwing this back at me, just replace New Yorker with NPR.
I let this go. It made for good conversations. What did I care he listened to old-people-radio.
Then he introduced me to “This American Life.” The weekly segment basically became a lover I started cheating on him with every Sunday at 4. But how often could I get away on that day at that time? Not often, so it ended up a pretty lame-ass affair.
Oh, but the power of the internet. This past summer my parents got me an iPod that I asked for but was rarely using. Then I discovered that I could sign up for a podcast of “This American Life” and revel in my nerdy passion.
I kept my relationship with the NPR segment a secret so as to maintain my presentation of being young and cool. (Shut up, Jake.)
But alas like so many good things, I couldn’t accept this new great thing as enough and I started to explore other NPR podcasts. Lots of them. Hours of them. Like, hours worth every single day. I fall asleep listened to Diane Rehm and wake up listening to “This I Believe.”
Hi, I am addicted to NPR podcasts.
I am old.
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