MARIAH MOMENT

WANA UDOBANG
Our last office meeting was dreadful. Well, all our office meetings are. A mass listening of your self played back to all. They call it the “aircheck tape”. We do this every week and it helps you know how dreadful you sound. Because strangely with the air check tape you just never sound right. Your a repetitious babbling bundle of mess. That’s it. That’s what you sound like, a hot pile of audible mess. So everyone in the room spits out bile alternatively known as constructive criticism. After a while of attending these meetings, you learn to take the good, accept the bad and just move on with the ugly. But that day i was told something a bit more interesting. After listening to everyone around the table drivel about how i could improve my very unsatisfactory performance on my Sunday show, my boss said to me “i don’t think you have a personality on Sundays”. Of everything he said i was most perplexed by that. He later explained that everyone liked the acid tongued, gossip ridden alter ego that i displayed on weekday mornings when presenting the entertainment digest ( a character named Mizz Infotainment who made a guest appearance only ten minutes a day). He said i needed to give the people what they wanted. I should become the authoritative figure on information (well soft cell trashy gossip). In my defence i told him that i felt it was unhealthy for me as an individual and as a professional.
Though during my internal monologue, i was really saying “wasn’t i already giving the people what they wanted, haven’t i given you people enough of my soul already?”. My friend is found dead with stab wounds in the woods, i have to be funny, witty and crazy, my aunt is in hospital with a lump in her neck, i have to be funny, witty and crazy, she dies a week later, i have to be funny, witty and crazy, I’m going to a funeral at twelve noon, my mother is in hospital, i get dumped in the morning, i still have to be funny, witty and crazy. Funny, witty and crazy have come to define me. I had conditioned myself to supress pain and all forms of other emotion because i have to be funny witty and crazy!!!!!!!
I had been told a fair few times that i was nothing close to my persona on the radio. People said when they listened to me on the radio i was insane and overly hyper. General unqualified pseudo psychotherapist had come to a conclusion that i showed schizophrenic and slightly bi-polar traits. I had successfully turned myself from campaign journalist cum custodian of the fourth estate to radio buffoon and still it wasn’t enough? They seemed to be breeding superstars in this place and until i had come full circle as a ten minute persona of my own invention, i was nothing close. My friend Banjo says maybe I’m looking for relevance. I think i have become a victim of my own invention. Fun sometimes doesn’t seem so fun anymore. I reckon i have created a monster. But hey, bills have to be paid and mouths to be fed. No time to check into rehab just yet.