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Just watching TV as a kid, for a long time I thought, as a young kid, obviously when I was, like, 4 or 5, I thought that people lived in the television.

I have a very specific memory of watching 'Singing in the Rain,' and looking at myself in the mirror after watching it and perceiving myself as one of those people that I was just watching on T.V. It was just kind of a knowing that this would be the world that I would enter into. And that's what I did.

I stared at the television in shock, watching as my private life was revealed to the world.

Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in a country that already knew how to watch itself. It was journalism that held the responsibility for seeing who we were and noticing what we did.

In my whole life, when I've watched TV and movies, I've almost always felt, 'I could do that better,' and I thought everyone felt that way.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

While all the other kids were out playing ball and stuff, I used to stay in my room and imagine that there was a camera in the wall. And I used to really believe that I was putting on a television show and that it was going out to somewhere in the world.

Watching myself. Watching the people around me. There was some part of me that was there as a kid and growing up and living my life, but there was also some part of me that was watching it all happen from the nosebleeds.