What most people find festive-a weekend at a beach shack with friends, a boat trip down a river, a crackling bonfire on a summer night-I see as a bleak nightmare to be grimly endured. I would sooner put lit cigarettes in my eyes than share a vacation house with a crowd.

I was working as a staff writer at Rolling Stone. I had a friend who worked at MTV, and she called me and said, "They're looking for VJs for this new channel. Do you want to try out?" I had zero TV experience, but I thought, "Well, what the hay."

Also because few people were watching - aside from a healthy amount of incarcerated people, because M2 was offered in a lot of prisons - I was able to ask really long, kind of muso questions, that they loved. We could really geek out and talk about music for long periods of time, and that tape would just keep rolling and rolling.

Sometimes we were really surprised. There were major artists that would come by because they wanted to.

I was 35. I was the oldest female VJ at Viacom ever. I left them, which at least preserved my dignity, because I'm sure they would eventually have kicked me to the curb. I mean, who there is over 35 now? I can't even imagine. On air? I was glad I lasted that long.

We were the ultimate consumers of the thing, and we thought, "Every college kid is going to go berserk. High school kids - it will introduce them to music they didn't know about. This is going to be a phenomenon." Plus, it seemed like it was insider-y, yet it was available to everyone. I thought, "Cable companies are going to be snatching this up." You think about the dreck that is on so many cable companies, of course they're going to love this. And we were just crushed that nobody cared.

When I hear the Spice Girls, yeah, all that '90s stuff, like Limp Bizkit. Dandy Warhols! Whenever I hear them, it takes me right back, because they were friends of the channel, too.