Last night, I was laying in that zone where your body is asleep but your mind is still going though its checklist of what bills you forgot to pay, what you need at the grocery store and what responsibilities you have at work when you wake up in the morning.
Then my mind wandered into blog territory.
What to blog about. What was I going to blog about? 9:15pm. The DNC? No. The water rescue? 9:18pm. Getting the equivalent of a nap for a good night's sleep? Yawn. Yikes. 9:27pm.
Don't ask me why - but at that point, I started going through the rundown of Daybreak. My mind settled on the Hollywood Minute. Just so you know (insider info - the general public doesn't know this until now) our producers will drop the Hollywood stories if we're running short on time. And you know what? I actually enjoy not reading it! Yes, it's true. To me, hearing the woes of multi-millionaires just doesn't do it for me. In fact, there's some sort of glee that comes with the words in our earpiece (IFB): "All of the Hollywood Minute is dropped." Score.
Sometimes, I get so wrapped up in the video of a story - I nearly forget I'm the one telling it. Sometimes, I wish we could spend more time on one topic or another. Sometimes, I wonder if you, our viewers, really care about what we're saying. Sometimes I think perhaps we should ask you, our viewers, if we're doing a good job in covering the things that matter to you. Well..?
I've overslept my 3 alarms and still made it into work by going a reasonable speed. That's only happened twice in 7 years. I've gotten done anchoring a show and thought that was the worst job I've ever done and beat myself up for it the rest of the day. That's happened often.
I trip over words. I make faces into the camera during commercial breaks to try and cheer up the crew who you never see...but we wouldn't be on the air without them. I've driven more pens into the palm of my hand to try and create a sense of pain to stave off hysterical laughter. That's rare... and happened earlier on in my career. But still. I'm also not the only anchor who's done that. I actually learned that tactic from a peer in Flagstaff back in 2001.
Sometimes I envision how comical this would all be if it were turned into a movie script, because I guess at the end of the day, when you're beyond delirium and desperately trying to squeeze any sleep out of a dwindling night, all you can do is laugh... and get ready to do it all over again the next day. Because in some strange way, this job is addicting, fun, frustrating and fantastic.