dispatch from madison

I've been in Madison the last couple of days, which included Sal's going away party last night. Now I'm waiting for Sal so we can, in fact, go away--drive down to Northwestern for the Cells to Society workshop. I see that Cells to Society is now listing my joining their faculty on their webpage, having taken my photo off the Robert Wood Johnson website. I need to get a professional publicity photo taken or something. Although, as important, I need to make sure that I'm reasonably shaven and that my remaining hair is in order when I have a professional take my photo.

I spent some time today continuing the multitrip project of cleaning out my office. Last time I was here, I spent an afternoon filling half of one of these giant plastic dumpsters of recycled paper and put all kinds of stuff on a free table for any takers. This time I put all my books and various other things in boxes. The experiences moving has been sometimes as if I had chosen an emotion at out of a hat, and then twenty seconds later choosing another emotion out of a hat, only instead of being random it was entirely induced by whatever I happened to have pulled out of the cupboard or file cabinet next.

A general virtue of moving is that it provides the opportunity to reduce clutter, especially if one applies the principle that something one hasn't used or missed since one's last move is something can get rid of. What was different about moving my office, though, is there were all sort of things associated with proto-projects that I don't exactly have any specific plans of going back to, but I hadn't exactly concluded I was never going back to. Some of these I'll move with me, but others I threw out.

Understand in several cases we were talking about materials and ideas from graduate school. For that matter, some of it was stuff from the first half of graduate school, when I did an entirely different kind of research substantively and methodologically from what I've done since. Still, hard to let go. And yet, for the most part, I did.