Out of Range

My earliest memories of the radio were listening to Blue Jays games (back in the heydays of the Jays in the early 1990s) as I fell asleep. As a little girl I had this slight aversion to falling asleep (and every once and a while even today I'll get the feeling too), as it seemed weird and a bit scary to one minute be awake and conscious and the next minute to wake up and find that 8 hours had passed. So I used to insist that I listen to the Jays games (like my dad and brother were doing, although usually for home games they watching them on TV downstairs) on my little pink radio, and I'd fall asleep to that. But somewhere along the way, the Jays won their two World Series and then stopped even making the playoffs, and I stopped needing the radio to help me fall asleep. In fact, I stopped listening pretty much all together...

In the car, I usually played a cd or my ipod, mostly because driving while singing is one of my favourite things to do and so I needed to be sure I would always know the words. But starting this fall, that has all changed. About three quarters of the time at work (the other quarter of the time it's either Abba's or Michael Jackson's Greatest Hits), the radio is on - set to EZ Rock 97.3. And while it plays entirely too much Backstreet Boys and Michael Bublé for my liking, I am super into the people who work there.

EZ Rock's whole thing is that it's Toronto's "favourite at work music station" - a point they make over and over. The daytime host guy continually says "10 great EZ songs getting you through your workday" and he always counts down to lunchtime, and then to 5 o'clock. These comments always make me smile because the picture of the working world he paints sounds almost too depressing. I imagine rooms of bored people sitting at their cubicles, ears glued to EZ Rock 97.3, suffering through their workdays, and counting the minutes (or songs) until 5 o'clock when they get to go home. I'd like to think there are a lot of people out there who actually enjoy their jobs and don't view each day as something they have to endure before they can leave. But maybe the people who do like their jobs don't listen to EZ Rock? He also makes continual comments about the weather - cheering when it's unseasonably warm (like it was last week) and bemoaning another "rainy day in Toronto" whenever it rains. I'm looking forward to hearing what he'll say once it starts snowing...

I've realized that the radio is actually a lot of fun - it's full of surprises (you never know which song will be played next), it's reliable, it's also romantic, in a way, to think about voices and songs and talk and music travelling over invisible air waves, and I enjoy the feeling of community (so cheesy I know!) I get whenever he starts talking about the weather and I know exactly what he's talking about. I haven't abandoned my ipod and cds in the car, I just sometimes choose instead to tune in to EZ Rock and sing along with the Backstreet Boys...