Mastering Master Control

... even though control is a complete illusion

Happy New Year, darlings.

Listen to today’s Jasmin’s Jargon instead of reading it:

My family brought in 2023 with an early dinner of vegan Korean food, followed by celebrating the UK’s New Year (which occurs at our 7pm), a sip of sparkling cider in a champagne cocktail glass, and then calling it a night at around 8. Never say lesbians don’t know how to party.

This was my first New Year’s in, maybe, forever that I didn’t stay up to watch the ball drop. I’m usually a get-dressed-in-sparkles and pour-the-nice-champagne kinda person.

But this year was different. This year, I was a bundle of nerves because I knew I had to wake up only four hours into the new year and make my way to the WXXI station to host my first-ever newscast solo. (Even typing this makes me nervous all over again.)

I’ve been in training for this new role—hosting Weekend Edition for Rochester, NY’s affiliate NPR station—for a little over a month. The on-air part has been the least of my concern; I’m comfortable in front of a mic, in front of people, whether in-person or broadcast.

But master control—the board that operates the radio—was a whole other animal.

As a 43-year-old, I’m not very used to learning whole new skills. Well, that’s not totally true: last year, I became adept at amateur snowshoeing (which is basically walking, but with weird shoes on).

One’s forties are customarily about growing within the path you’ve already created. And in many ways, that’s what WXXI is for me, since I’ve been working in various aspects of multimedia for the last many years. But bringing in a skill as technical and hands-on (and, frankly, terrifying) as mastering master control feels very much like getting a master’s degree in something totally unrelated to anything I’ve ever done before.

And I’m here for it.

Honestly, I feel so lucky to be able to learn this—and, more than that, to be taught this by a team of experts who really want me to succeed. There’s kind of nothing greater than that.

In radio, you have a millisecond to press that button and move that lever and turn that thing on, or literally thousands of people will hear your mistake in real-time. Add to that the scripts, commercials, legal IDs, weather, headlines, and teasers you need to read (while pressing those damn buttons), and the sound booth can be a terrifying place.

That’s why I went to bed at 8pm on New Year’s Eve.

Have you heard the study about the nuns and dementia? The short version is that a bunch of nuns were followed around, some of whom spent much of their life engaging their brains (through further education or complex writing), and some of whom hadn’t. By and large, the nuns who had used their noggins in a more rigorous way had less dementia. Our brains want to expand.

It’s the start of a new year. All the morning talk shows are focusing on resolutions and new habits. And I get how annoying that can be, especially for those of us who are busy with the rigamarole of our day-to-day lives; we don’t necessarily have time to focus on changing much.

But since this Substack has a focus on self-growth, avoiding activist burnout, and mental health, I’ll just throw this out there: Is there a new skill you want to learn this year? If there is, what does it mean to take the first step toward achieving that? Signing yourself up for a workshop? Buying those snowshoes?

Imagine yourself a year from now. Really do it, I’ll wait. Do you want that future version of you to have a skill that present-you doesn’t yet have?

For those of you who have written campaign plans before, you know how to do this already: start with the end result and go backward from there. If, by December, you want to knit a hat, calendar in how much time you are going to spend knitting. What’s easier than a hat? A scarf? So maybe you do that in October? OK, so let’s keep going backward. By August, you probably want to know how to cast on and cast off. Cool. So by June, you will have probably taken a beginner’s class somewhere (even if online). That means that by April, you will have all of your materials and have familiarized yourself a bit with what you want to do and what resources are available to you. And by February, you will have your tools. So, darling, order those knitting needles this week.

We must stretch our brains in order to keep growing. We must learn new skills in order to, well, stay humble … and, dare I say, young.

As for me, my first solo encounter with Master Control went decently well, but I was far from perfect. There were misunderstandings about programming (apparently, there isn’t a 7am local newscast on a holiday … which I found out the hard way, after trying to do the damn thing, only to have it not work—thank goodness for the dummy-proofing that locked me out!), contradictions in how I’ve been trained (two people have been training me, and they don’t necessarily both see eye-to-eye on everything, which put me in a confusing position), and a good old mistake made by yours truly. Apparently, I haven’t mastered Master Control.

This makes sense, if you think about it, because anyone who has been through any sort of difficult times in their life can tell you that control, after all, is just an illusion. You can do your best to master control, but there will always be hiccups, and dropped stitches in your knitted hat. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t wear it, though. Wearing a hat with a dropped stitch is going to keep you warmer than not wearing one at all.

xo,

jazz

P.S. Did you know that I’m offering a cute zine to all paid subscribers of Jasmin’s Jargon? So please sign up, if you haven’t yet. And if you are a paid member and haven’t received one yet, send me a note with your address and I’ll pop that in the mail to you.