Where's my f*&^%!!& delete key?!

K-Rock 105.7 morning host Darryl Kornicky looked at me and started howling.
Tony Orr was also smiling.
Apparently, I'd just unleashed a deep-hacking-try-and-shake-the-phlegm-out cough into the microphone. When it was on.
At 7 a.m.
For thousands to hear.
Who needs an alarm when you have Sarah Crosbie and her chest cold to get you up out of bed.
Oh, morning radio, how you scare me.
For nine years, I was a newspaper reporter and editor and there's this frickin' wonderful invention on a keyboard called a DELETE key. When you're writing a story and you make a mistake, you hit delete and it fabulously disappears from your screen.
For five mornings X 3.5 hours a morning, so 17.5 hours of my life, I've been doing morning radio and there is no delete key. Things just come flying out of my mouth and I hope they're OK, funny even. Smart, maybe. Interesting.
In one week, we talked about crusty toenails, Dorothy the Dinosaur, bad drivers, In the Night Garden, A-Rod and his drugs, the K-Rock Centre, Neil Young, animal food banks, The Tragically Hip's new song, the Academy Awards, Dweezil Zappa, Easter Seals kids, belly button fluff, Tony Orr's alleged manscaping, green box recycling, potholes, Jamaica, Pancake Tuesday, Willie Nelson, great hockey coaches, "thick" women, lottery tickets and how I am not actually Mrs. Crosbie, despite Darryl Kornicky's blog entry on the K-Rock website.
I've burned a hole through Kornicky's head staring at him this week. Partly I was staring because I was a little nutty. I had to get up at 4 a.m. Monday and Tuesday killed me and then by Wednesday I was OK. Up at 4, showered by 4:15, reading the papers, blogs, my e-mail and Twitter (my favourite new thing in life) by 4:30 so I knew everything going on in the world. But I mostly spent a good chunk of my week staring at him because, for the first time in a long, long time, I had someone in a professional capacity I could learn from. I absolutely loved my old job, putting out an entertainment magazine at The Kingston Whig-Standard, but I didn't have any mentors at the paper. They've either left and moved on, or taken jobs that meant I no longer interacted with them. This week, I had the thrill of being scared again, being on my toes. Instead of being the seasoned journalist, I was the green radio co-host. Terrified shitless and loving every single second of it.
So, I used this week as a crash course in radio. I listened very carefully every time Kornicky took a phone call with a listener to see how he interacted with them and I watched Tony Orr do the news. When he speaks, you listen to him. It's a great gift to have. So little things some people may not pay attention to – how my radio guys held the mics, how far they were from the mics, how they announced the call letters "K-Rock 1-0-5-7 – I obsessed over all week and maybe, possibly I practised in the shower at 4 a.m. when no one could hear me.
The coolest thing about K-Rock letting me crash the morning party was how much freakin' fun it was to make peoples' mornings great.
On Tuesday, I baked two Neil Young tickets into a pancake on Pancake Tuesday and held a drive-thru contest in the K-Rock parking lot. And this morning, we offered two Willie Nelson tickets to anyone who would go into a gas station in Kingston and sing a Willie song in honour of the fact he's an environmentalist and a biodiesel promoter. The winner made his wife's day. (She, in fact, ordered him to do it.)
This week also gave me a chance to play reporter again, getting Const. Mike Menor from the Kingston Police to tell us about bad drivers in the city - he once saw two people naked in a car who'd just come from skinny dipping in Portsmouth Olympic Harbour - and having Sandy Singers from the Partners in Mission Food Bank explain to us how needy families in this area can help feed their pets.
It was a fun week.
Sorry for the cough though, everyone. r
Yes, I see that "r". I'm going to leave it there. It's symbolic of the fact I no longer have a DELETE key in my professional life, heck, I don't have a professional life, but that's OK. You gotta go with the flow. A little lesson I learned from the K-Rock Morning Krew.

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Hi. My name is Sarah Crosbie and I am unemployed ...

OK, after a month and a half, I can finally come out and say it: I have no job. I am unemployed. I am a free agent.
I was laid off.

For more than eight years, I worked at The Kingston Whig-Standard (Canada's oldest continually published daily newspaper) as a weekend reporter, a copy editor, investigative reporter, music columnist, and features editor. I covered the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City with my good friend and Whig photographer Jennifer Pritchett. We were there, in the Big Apple, to tell the story of Kingstonians affected by the attacks. One year later, we both returned to the big city to see how Kingstonians' lives had changed and to see if we could track down how some of the local charitable donations had been spent there.
I spent one weekend in Ottawa hunting down Avril Lavigne at the Juno Awards where her debut Let Go was nominated for a bucket-load of trophies in 2003. I watched Gord Downie pick a piece of fluff out of his star on Canada's Walk of Fame and call it "belly button" fuzz 2002.
I got my butt stuck in a soap box derby car when I was a young reporter. I'd gone down the hill at the charity race and when I reached the bottom, I was stuck. There were volunteers at the race who had walkie talkies at the top and bottom of the hill. The conversation went something like this: "Smoky, this is Bluebird. We've got a problem. The Whig reporter is stuck in the car."
"The Whig reporter is stuck in the car? What's the problem?"
"She's wedged herself in the vehicle. You got tools?"
"We'll look for a saw. She's really stuck, huh? Man."
Yeah, that was fun. I had a big butt, I can not lie.
I was once nominated for a National Newspaper Award, Canada's top newspaper honour for an investigative piece on disgraced choirmaster John Gallienne.
I also followed the rise of Kingston's Ryan Malcolm from unknown bar singer to the first Canadian Idol. Every week for an entire summer in 2003, I went back and forth to the John Bassett Theatre in Toronto where I documented his rise on the pop singing show. The issue where we ran not one, not two, not three but four massive features on him (The News Story, The Colour Reaction Story, The Look Back Column, The Evolution of a Person Story) the day after he won – that paper sold out. It was the best story – documenting a guy achieving his dream, with the support of his city behind him.
My idea, Cool Kids, was published last spring - a special magazine dedicated to the amazing high school students in this area.
Every week, I edited The Whig's entertainment magazine The Ticket.
I worked on that magazine every week. Forty pages, every week. All year. I have a son, but The Ticket was my baby. Now it has new (and capable) parents, but she was mine to make for you, the readers.
I've worked with incredible editors – and I married one of the best.
The highlight of my time there was when the paper was alive and screaming with energy, big (sometimes sensational) headlines (but you do want people to stop at the box, look at the paper and then buy it, right? Of course) and colourful, meaningful, important, well-written stories. It was around 2002-05 and I was a reporter, writing everything and anything and then an editor. Noreen Rasbach (now an editor at The Globe in Toronto) was the editor and Rob Tripp (now the police reporter at The Whig) was the city editor. It was a good time to be a reporter at The Whig. Every year, we went to the National Newspaper Awards and dominated the Ontario Newspaper Awards. We did kooky stories (like my piece on a Big Beaver attraction wanting to move into the area) and investigative pieces on sex offenders and health care.
That was then.
Now, I do kooky things like laundry and investigate where cheese is on sale.
One week, I went nuts buying cases of water at Food Basics for $2 each.
The next week, they were on sale at No Frills for $1.88 each.
"I lost money!" I screamed at my husband. "I should have waited!"
"Baby," he said. "It's 12 cents."
Oh, yeah. Right.
In December, I was one of 600 Sun Media employees who lost their jobs.
And I'm heartbroken to no longer be at The Whig, but what really hurts is worrying about the future of the paper. What role does local news have in an world (and economy) dictated by the Internet? Yes, it's hard for a newspaper to compete with websites on things like celebrity gossip. People magazine can report on an issue the second it happens on its website, but newspapers can't give out the information until the next day in its issue, unless the paper has a sophisticated website going, but most local papers haven't perfected (or figured out, really) how to balance the news in their pages and on their websites at the same time. But websites and national chains and the big dailies can't give local readers important local stories (the ongoing halfway house battle in Kingston, Queen's University's struggle with Homecoming, Kingston General Hospital's restructuring efforts) ... and without a local paper, who will review Kingston's theatre productions? Who will tell you about the new restaurants in town? Who will profile the up-and-coming bands that are dying for attention?
Local news is critical to a city. A local newspaper bands citizens together. It tells us about local boys heading off to the Olympics, Good Samaritans who stopped a thief in our city, how our tax money is being spent and how our OHL team is doing. (Well, I can also tell you that – the Frontenacs aren't doing well, but who am I to judge? Some days, I don't shower.)
It's an interesting time to watch newspapers and see who survives (and thrives even?) and how they do it. It would a great time to be a sociologist working in media studies because mass media is changing every second.
Will I ever be a newspaper girl again? I don't know.
Being laid off gives you a lot of time to think, (which gives you an excuse to not do the dishes), and I've realized that life is short and the career I thought I'd have forever didn't even get me to age 32.
There have been some highs and many, many lows being laid off (I haven't slept through the night in six weeks, however I have ripped arms from going to the gym so often) but that's for another time. Something a journalist would call The Followup Story.

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A different kind of threesome

In England, the word "brilliant" has a different meaning than here. If Canadians say Dexter is a brilliant show, we mean it's smart. If we say, "that Sarah Crosbie is quite brilliant" we mean I'm smart and stuff. But in England, if someone says "that show is brilliant," it means wonderful, fabulous, perfect.
I have a "brilliant" British friend who I've known since we did a band exchange (no, not like band camp) when we were in high school. (Little known fact: I played the oboe for five years.) She recently sent me an e-mail about what's going on in her life. I read it quickly and was happy to know she was doing well and 2009 was going to be the year of her life when she found herself a nice man.
Then, two days later, I reread the e-mail. We only communicate a few times each year, so I read it again to see if I had missed anything. It's funny how your eyes skim over something and don't get the real meaning.
I thought she said: She was going to find a man. But that's not what she said at all.
What she actually said was: "My new years resolution for 2009 is for a man to find me ( i have written that correctly, as i have no time or interest in speed dating, internet dating etc...)."
I realized in my 31 years that I've never heard a woman say that before. It's always "I'm gonna find me a man!" But anything is possible – maybe more men will start declaring, "I'm gonna find me a nice woman!" (And actually mean it.) Anything seems to be possible these days. After all, America elected a black (and scrumptious) president, Mr. Barack Obama, Mickey Rourke has made a comeback*, and despite the fact that American Idol continues to produce super flops (Taylor Hicks, Katherine McPhee, Rueben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino) while voted-out losers like Chris Daughtry and Jennifer Hudson score big-time, a new season of the show debuts tonight.
Of course, not all women are ready to hurry up and wait. Sometimes women have to take it into their own hands and I admire the gusto of three local ladies who are doing it together. Yes, we girls like to go to the bathroom together. Now, we're banding together to find love together: "Attention gentlemen: Are you footloose and fancy free? Three professional, single women, EACH wanting a kind, considerate, single, unattached male between the ages of 55-75 years for companionship, travel and to share life's adventures. Please send a note with your age and phone number."
The ladies placed the ad in Kingston's daily newspaper, The Whig-Standard.
Note, too, that all they want is someone between the ages of 55 and 75. It's not like when men place ads that say, "Seventy five year old gentleman seeking lady, 24 to 27, with blonde hair, svelte figure, high income, love of nature, fishing, Alaska, beer, bacon burgers who is happy, loving, perfect, kind, and smokin' hot."
What do you think? Should women sit back and let the men find them, or should women be proactive and go get 'em. Half empty or half full? Desperate or keen? Pathetic or driven? I say you go after what you want, or do what feels right for you so you'll never have regrets.
One last thing: You're never too old to get hitched. And that's brilliant.


*Looking for a hot night with your lady/man? Rent 1986's 9 1/2 Weeks with Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. It's a hot movie, but not one that you have to go through saloon-style doors into a creepy back room to rent. Know what I mean? ...

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