New Mexico

I'm in the midst of a one-week visit at the Santa Fe Institute. The main purpose of my visit is to plan the 2008 Beijing Complex Systems Summer School. But while I'm here there are a number of other projects I'm working on, too. The days have been busy, but good.

I've been coming to SFI since 1996. It's a great place, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend time here over the years. SFI isn't a utopia, but it's been in some sense a refuge for me over the past decade. Even though I haven't spent that much time here in the big scheme of things, SFI has a certain familiarity and almost a home-like feeling.

Although I've had a very productive few days, I'm starting to wonder how I'm going to get done all the things I need to get done before December 16, when I'm heading to Chile to spend two weeks with Doreen trekking and hanging out.

Well ... this post is going nowhere. I'm feeling somewhat introspective and pleasantly melancholy, but I seem incapable of capturing these thoughts in writing. This doesn't bode well, since the vast majority of what I need to do in the next few weeks is writing of some sort of another: A small grant, a research paper, student evaluations, two referee reports, many letters of recommendation, and many memos and notes and emails. But I suppose that these writing tasks probably shouldn't involve too much introspection or melancholy, so maybe it's ok.