“I can’t listen to this anymore,” my loving and supportive wife told me after listening to ten minutes of the Internet radio talk show I hosted for this edition’s Battle of the SeXes. “It’s just too painful . I feel as if my ears are about to start gushing blood.”

Despite those tender remarks, I somehow came out as the victor of the Radio Challenge. The triumph came as a surprise to me, considering the remarks that the listeners were making such as “ass-clown” and “cunt” in the chatroom that accompanies the radio show. However, when all was said and done, I ended up with 30 downloads of the show, 24 live listeners and 13 callers (although many of those callers hung up). Kamyelle, my opponent, had 28 downloads, 16 live listeners and 24 callers.

The horrendous quality of the show came as no surprise to me as I had a tingling sensation in my journalistic gonads that the show was going to be an endurance trial on both my own and the listeners’ psyches. One listener even begged for me to end the show early, but I did not waver. I had taken a fond liking to the notion that perhaps the audience was on the verge of insanity, or possibly suicide . screaming like a banshee in a secluded room.

The topics assigned to us were women’s basketball, the legalization of marijuana and Pop-Tarts versus Toaster Strudels. We were supposed to discuss each topic for 15 minutes, but I ended up talking about each for about 45 seconds. After all, how long can a person talk to themselves with little or no feedback from what, for all I could have known, was an imaginary audience.

I have never alluded to any fantastic ideas of having any interest or desire in working on radio.

Yet I was cornered and pressured into taking on this edition’s challenge, solely for the fact that I am cursed with having a low voice . the result of ten years of chain-smoking.

As the show began, I felt like a passenger in a car that was headed toward an inevitable crash.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I totally destroyed the audience of listeners that my fellow student (whose show we took over for a weekend) has worked on building for the past year in the 60 minutes that I took over the airwaves.

In the end, I learned what I had already known . and that is that I could never and will never have a job in radio or broadcast journalism.