Sigh...

I just don't know what I'm going to do about that girl.

Anyway. As you may have guessed from Katelyn's...ahem...informative blog post, we spent the lovely Thanksgiving holidays with her family in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Laying out on a hammock in her backyard with a good book under the autumn leaves was, I think, an excellent respite from the constant go-go-go that has been our lives for the past several months. That, and shooting BB guns with her two brothers in the backyard. (Mom, I've never wanted a BB gun before, but THIS Christmas...)

Just kidding.

Sorta.

Anyway, with barely three weeks left on the road, we're desperately trying to tie up any loose ends that can't be tied up back in St. Louis. With almost 40 hours of footage, we've stopped trying to frantically find something, ANYTHING to put in front of the camera (sort of like we did at the beginning of the trip) but still there are a few people we want to talk to before we head home. One is here in Ithaca, at Cornell University where we're staying with my best buddy, Ben. Dr. Harry Segal, a psychologist who specializes in "psychodynamic approaches to literary texts" (whatever THAT means) has agreed to meet with us this weekend. That will be cool because it will lend, I think, a bit of an "academic" bent to our film.

In New York City, where we're hoping to be within a week or two, provided we find a place to stay, we are meeting with a producer who has written and directed an Off-Broadway show which collects over 4,000 stories of people's "first times" and performs them with four different actors and actresses.

And a week from yesterday, we are meeting the founder of StoryCorps, the national initiative to collect stories from everyday Americans, in Boston. Mr. Dave Isay is currently on a book tour for StoryCorps first book, Listening Is An Act of Love, and we will be filming both the signing he will be at on Monday and also have a brief exclusive interview with him.

We're only looking for about one or two more interviews, and then it will be all over. I have to admit I'm strangely excited to be going back to school, the classes I'll be in are going to be great, but I'm a bit nervous about editing this whole thing together. I've been thinking about it lately, mostly because people have begun asking if I've started to think about how it's all going to fit together, and the truth is I really haven't.

The biggest concern I have right now is I think I'm just beginning to grasp how weird of a concept this is for a documentary. I mean, how do you document stories? How do you document what stories are, what they mean? We can just play all of our interviews back-to-back, but goodness knows that's boring. How are we going to make this interesting enough to other people? Specifically other people who are not our friends and family, who are by default required to find it interesting. This will, I think, be our biggest struggle in the year to come.

That being said, next semester is already stressing me out and I haven't even set foot on campus yet. A lot of opportunities and options have been presenting themselves and I'm trying to decide which ones to choose. A lot of it has been consuming my mind so much I'm finding it hard to focus on the film and the trip. It's been increasingly harder to keep my mind on the here and now as school looms closer and closer. But, such is life.

Besides, it's the Christmas season and that always cheers my spirits, despite the fact that radio stations seem to think there are only, like, 20 good Christmas songs worth playing over and over and over and over and over and over....