OMG I missed it by FOUR days!!

So here I sit, un-employed, wait I mean SELF-employed and looking forward to celebrating my D-Day (The one year anniversary of my Departure from KSN.)  Honestly, I thought it might be tomorrow, so for giggles and grins I looked it up…..yes on my calendar it reads, LAST DAY AT KSN.  Here’s the funny part, it was April 24th.  That day that so defined the end of one of my lives and the beginning of another went by unnoticed!  I completely brain-farted.  I could have sworn it was the 29th.

The question I ask myself is am I happier?  The answer is easy.  Yes.  I miss one part of being Anita Cochran more than I should, but the rest of her I don’t miss at all.   That part that’s missing is feeding off  an audience and “performing.”   In some ways I still do.  Teaching in front of students at Wichita State University, allows me to have an “audience” of sorts.  It still allows me to produce and write and tell stories, just in a different capacity. I perform in front of the camera still with some freelance commercial work (Okay, Gregory Agency I’m ready for my next gig!!)  It’s just the DAILY being on TV that I miss.  (Not that I ever saw myself, since TV News is live and I rarely watched the newscast after …..I really only caught glimpses of me on TV anyway! )

I don’t miss news like I thought I would.  A big story breaks I find out about it on Twitter, and typically google the latest details IF, and it’s a BIG IF….IF I am even interested in it.  My news mind is completely different now that I’m not responsible for getting all that stuff to you.  Mostly now I just understand why most of you didn’t care about much of what we served up on the TV for you.

I don’t miss having to be somewhere (aka full-time job) EVERY single day, or in my case NIGHT.  I love having the power to decide whether I will work a day here or there or take on a project strictly based on whether or not the money is worth the time I have to invest.  It’s the ultimate luxury.  I wish for all of you a chance to live like that at least for a year.

I don’t miss being the TYPE A Supermom who really wasn’t present.  My relationship with my girls has grown 10-fold since I stepped out of the newsroom and back into my own home.  I never let that news anchor guard down at home, and didn’t even realize it until the first time I was in bed with my daughter tickling her when I normally would have been back at work prepping a newscast.  I had NEVER done that before bedtime because I was too busy, wait I wasn’t even home for bedtime.

I don’t miss the back-biting of the industry, the rumor mill that we so heavily supported, or the physical work that it took to actually get a newscast together.   I don’t even miss the paycheck as much as I thought I would.  I guess that’s why I missed my D-Day Anniversary the first time it rolled around. I really don’t miss it.    I’m in a better place, one that would be perfect if we just had some damn TV cameras around!!

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.