alright guys - i need to tell you about a radio program.

i'm listening to it right now, online, but it appears on NPR, 90.7 here, at 1-2pm on Saturdays - and it's called This American Life.

it's basically storytelling, it's very old-fashioned. a theme is brought up every week and explored in between 2 and 5 acts - 2-5 stories about that theme. the theme can be literally anything, and has been. there's been: babysitting, notes on camp, time to save the world, say anything (about the importance of talk), monogamy, pet stories, guns, superpowers, canadians, cruelty of children, sinatra, simulated worlds (about all the artificial life created - fake oval offices/medieval times/colonial towns), poultry, father's day, an FBI sting, accidental documentaries.. it goes on and on. and it's very simple - some things are narrated and some just guided every now and then. there are no commercials, but musical interludes. the pauses and the background music are very important and shape the way a story is told and heard. and so this is a form of news.. these are often news stories.. but not news like what we'd think of news, but stories that have been passed down, or have happened recently, just people's stories. it is not sensationalized by any means, and yet there are still sensational stories - two men in a fight in the middle of the highway during traffic after one insults the other's mother from another car, a girl hiding in a dumpster from girls with guns, kids who make up a family to babysit for so they can get out of an oppressive mother's home, a staged show of Peter Pan that goes horribly awry.. these are things that could wind up on your evening news as "strange stories of the day" or on dateline or one of those shows as something similar.. they're not all strange stories.. sometimes they're just personal stories that touch something not many personal stories do - because there's a sentimentality but there's nothing cheesy in these "touching stories", they just hit a nerve in a different way.

some of my favorite stories so far have been from "superpowers" and "time to save the world". in the first, they had a story where this guy went around conducting an unofficial study asking people, what would you choose: flight or invisibility, you will be the only person on earth to have this power, and you can't have both. and the answers are so interesting and it's explored further in how these two, apart from so many other superpowers, touch a particular part of our psyche - flight for those who are not ashamed, and invisibility, for most of us who are. the final question then was: who do you want to be? the person you hope to be, or the person you fear you truly are?

"time to save the world" first had a story about a man who worked at a dating ad service, and a guy would come in and place a "missed you" ad - the ones where you say "you were that girl on the train, our eyes locked, call me.." - and he would place these ads constantly, 10, 15, it got ridiculous, and over time this guy who worked there got to know this man taking out the ads, realized he was a great guy, just incredibly shy, and decided to do him this favor of writing a letter for him to make 20 copies of and hand to the women he wanted to talk to - and what it said was priceless. another story from that bunch was about a man who answered the phone when you called H-E-A-T-H-E-R, answered only to that name, and talked to anyone about anything. teenagers would prank call him usually but he wouldn't hang up on them, eventually some people called to get things off their chest, to talk to this anonymous person because they couldn't talk to anyone else, and he would always listen, and be sympathetic, and not really give advice but just be this ear for people, and that was an incredible story. they got a hold of him for the program so we all get to meet him. he had been doing that for 50 years.

so this is what i'm talking about. they're just stories, but they're so intriguing, and they're presented in such a simple yet interesting way, it's so easy to get absorbed in this stuff. and, to my joy, so much of the episodes are available online! thisamericanlife.com features almost every show they've had in realaudio format - downloading the new realplayer was a pain in the ass because they keep trying to get you to pay for things or put credit card info in, but you manage to get around it, and now i get all of these episodes of the past 8 years that i've missed, in perfect quality, right here in this handy dandy computer. i sat around last night with my dad and we listened to the stories i talked about above - and it felt so neat, like it was 1920 and there weren't any televisions yet, just sitting and listening to the radio and smiling and laughing and talking about it afterwards. that's good times right there. so people, i urge you to go to their website and read about the stories, find some you like, listen to superpowers and time to save the world at the very least, and go to "our favorites" because i'm just beginning to explore that stuff and it's great so far - and you can read what each act is about and how long it is usually, so if you want to skip certain stories and get to the good stuff. well it's all good stuff. it's great stuff. go and explore and tell me what you think. it's like nothing you've ever heard.