I really only did it for the free tote bag
The fall fundraising campaign at my local public radio station kicked off this morning. I’ve listened to NPR on and off as long as I can remember. My mom likes to put it on in the car, and even after I started driving my brother and myself to school, we would still listen to it every morning. John Lienhard’s “Engines of Our Ingenuity” came on right before we got to school (when we were on time, which was rare).
When I was at school last fall and (practically) living in the astro lab, I listened to NPR almost 24 hours a day. In LA there’s a station that doesn’t play music at all, just talk, and I’d leave it on all the time. Even when I went to sleep (on the couch), I would turn it down as low as it could go, so that it was just a murmur in the background.
Now that I spend an hour or two in my car most days, and especially since I got rid of my TV, NPR has become the soundtrack of my life, more or less. I still listen to commercial radio, but I can only listen to the same 20 songs on repeat so many times before I feel like jamming pencils into my ears. If I had an iPod, I’d put podcasts on it and listen to those, but I don’t yet (and I might not anytime soon, if the Nano screens are really as scratch-prone as some folks say they are. We’ll see.)
When I’m home, the radio is almost always on in the background. When I’m relaxing (playing Spider Solitaire or browsing blogs, basically), I usually tune it to commercial radio, but if I’m actually working on something I have to be listening to NPR—songs with lyrics make it impossible for me to concentrate. I wake up every day to Morning Edition; it’s much gentler and less jarring than an alarm, and I can lie there and learn things until I’m ready to roll out of bed.
Usually I stop listening during the membership drives, but this morning I realized that hey, I really do owe these guys something. I think my parents have been KUHF members for years, but this is the first time I’ve contributed on my own. It feels good. Public radio rocks my socks.
Tags: miscellany