Thinking Out Loud

Downtown Athens, Ohio

Part of the 18 mile bike path that goes through the University

Athens countryside

It's times like this when it would be nice to have a burning passion.  Too bad you can't just pick a passion...that it has to come to you.

Possible Passion, Film MFA. 
Three programs interested us enough to spend millions of hours filling out applications.  We spent November filling out Florida State,  January, filling out Ohio University and February, filling out City College of New York.  All of these programs are production oriented in a place that we wouldn't mind living and didn't require a GRE (my requirement).  Even with our ages on the applications, we made it through to the interview stage at Florida* and Ohio. We're thinking that City College may have lost our applications.  Flying, hotel, interview, new place, new people....the interview process in itself was an adventure.

Pretty Big News.  
Vince and I were just offered 2 of the 10 spots (126 applied) in the Ohio University MFA Film Program.  Until that phone call, my knees were the only things I really had to think about and now we have to decide, by April 24, if we want to live in Athens, Ohio for three years.   April 24th isn't all that far away and to add to the DD (decision difficulty), there are exactly the same number of pros as cons.
 
Top Eight Pros:
•It was hard to get in.
•The countryside surrounding Athens is our kind of countryside (tiny rolling country roads with little traffic, TONS of mountain bike and hiking trails, a 18 mile paved bike path, easy to get out of town into the country).
•The town is funky (coffee shops, old timey food co-op, vegetarian restaurants, brew pub).
•The faculty seems to love their jobs and to like us.
•The program is fairly renowned.
•It's a new environment.
•It would give us a structure.  Without the structure of being in school we doubt we would get around to producing a noteworthy film.  One that people could watch without us being there to explain it. :) I don't care about winning an Oscar but Vince wants to.
•It would be fun** and provide a real sense of accomplishment.

Top Eight Cons:
•It's not Paris, Portland, Madison, Bozeman or Amsterdam.
•It's three years and we're 55.  Do we want to spend what's left of our youth in school? (i.e. tied down)
•There is an off chance we would make a noteworthy film without being in school.
•It starts August 26th and we have to put the Plainfield property on the market, open up Cape Cod, close down Vermont, make sure my knees work etc.
•Max is 11.  Do we want to introduce him to another new environment? 
•I think the town is pretty run down (student rentals, depressed) Vince doesn't see it as run down.  Admittedly, when we were there, it was a pretty dreary day.
•Do we want to miss skiing in Craftsbury those winters?
•We kind of like what we're doing now.  (what are we doing now?)

We're not trying to chose between a couple different schools but between doing it and not doing it.  So I guess the big question is, "Do we want to do it more than anything?" because that would have to be the case.  

*Florida decided for us. (we're sure it was because of our age) but we'd already decided we didn't want to live in Tallahassee partly because the healthfood store didn't list all of the ingredients in the hot table foods and the one funky restaurant in town didn't have a single vegetarian entree'.  

**Almost nothing could have been more fun for us than having a copy of 'You're Not Cindy' (our first 'real' film) in the car with us at all times and showing it wherever/whenever.