I’m Learning So Much My Brain Hurts

I thought the easiest way to make a woman feel stupid was to let her give birth after the age of 30.   Oh, that worked for me, too….but now, at age 45, I find going back to college as an INSTRUCTOR is really making me feel uneducated!

It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to Video Storytelling or Broadcast News Writing, the two classes I’m teaching at Wichita State University this semester.  I was, after-all, a News Anchor for 20 years.  In my time I did it all, from writing to shooting to editing to messing up names LIVE on the air, I thought that made me smart.  What it made me was good at one thing.  Now that I’ve left the security of the anchor desk, I’m wallowing in things I don’t know, EVERYWHERE I look.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook have watched me try new things.  On-line radio was a hoot, and I loved taping the episodes in my jammies in the basement, but the pay wasn’t worth getting up for.  Free-lance talent has been fun, but it’s performance-based stuff that reminded me a lot of my news days (just less acting….you guess which one!!)  Retail turned out to be something I love, no big shock to anyone who knows me.  Even then, I remember my first days at The First Place coming home complaining that I knew NOTHING.  Didn’t know the jewelry designers, the crystal lines, the houseware top-sellers….I did pick up rather quickly  how to run the credit cards through the machine (probably picked that up by watching my own credit card be swiped a million jillion times.) Now that I’m in the academic world, it’s more of the unknown.  The computer systems are foreign.   The video editing equipment isn’t close to what we used back when I actually did my own editing.  The real kicker there are so many computer log-ins I’m calling myself names I never thought appropriate.

All that aside, and admitting, that I’m getting tired of learning new things again…..I’m also realizing I’m even SMARTER than I was before.  I actually feel sorry for lifers, like me, who get really good and comfortable and start thinking they know it all.  Sure, I knew it all,  within the walls of my cubicle, but back out in the real world I’m hard at work learning all the things I thought someone ELSE needed to know.  

Leon Liebl

I couldn’t believe it, my brother called today and said, “Hey, I hear Leon Liebl isn’t on TV in Kansas City anymore.”

I about spit my drink out because, the once up on everything Anita Cochran, hadn’t heard that he’d been part of cutbacks at KSHB in Kansas City.   For those of you who say, hummmm, that Leon Liebl name sounds familiar.  That’s because for five of the years you watched me on KSN-TV doing the weekend news, Leon was sitting beside me reading sports, sometimes throwing pens, and always making me laugh.  Love the guy, like the little brother I never wanted.

I love to tell the story of sitting in Hays, Kansas working my tail off as a cub reporter, anchor, producer, the list goes on and on and on.  Somedays working 12 hour days with all that heavy equipment, thinking this is insane!!  The only thing that kept me going was at least I wasn’t Leon Liebl, doing the same sad thing in Garden City.  Then I’d chuckle.

The funny thing is when KSN finally called to bring me home, they didn’t really mean Wichita.  They wanted me to move to GARDEN CITY so LEON LIEBL could move to Wichita.  I took the gig and fell in love with southwest Kansas, and Leon Liebl.  I still consider it home, but then again, all of Kansas fells like my home.

Eventually I replaced Leon as anchor of the morning show, before we finally were paired together on weekends.   We have much in common, and Leon I keep the letter you wrote me when Mom died.  I always will.

So anyway, this is just to say, Leon I’m looking for you, and heard you’re taking some time to decide your next move, Congratulations.   May your new life, be every bit as spectacular as mine, and should we need to, I will be more than happy to work beside you once again.  I’m Anita Cochran, and that’s what I really wanted to say.

 

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