Life: A short update from Hawai’i

Aloha… I have only 5 minutes on the computer, so I’ll keep this brief: I’m in Honolulu now after a very long day of flying and waiting for broken airplanes; now in the conference hotel awaiting lunch.

I met a very charming and brilliant young woman from Turkey on the flight from Salt Lake to San Fran, hung out with her there and then again today 🙂 The weather is, of course, perfect. The conference has just 1400 attendees, so it’s cozy – not like the 2500 I had expected. Also I received an email from a professor at York U in Canada looking to share a room (out of the blue) and so will have a roommate starting today.

Lots of netw0rking/sharing ideas already over/after breakfast with brilliant people (one a very lovely half Italian/half Asian woman) and even a contractor, “I pound nails” (a husband of a presenter).

As I mentioned to my friend Ali before leaving, it is shaping up to be an ‘orgy of the mind’. Whether that’s a necessarily good thing, I won’t say. The keynote talk, a sort of ‘state of the humanities’ was downbeat: we don’t listen to classical music any more, we just follow market trends, people don’t read books, sob sob sob… And the guy called PostModern theory ‘damaging’ to the humanities…. hmm…. He also refered to himself as a trogolodite, so go figure…

OK, time is up – life is good.