parallel: This should not happen. You have found a bug.
You have to upgrade to latest version 20181222 before reporting a bug.
* The bugid: host check too many col0: thalamus_nfs mkdir: cannot create directory '/projects/freesurfer': Permission denied
You are probably running the command as a user which does not have the right access.
Try make a directory in say /tmp/foo and look at this to see who the owner is:
ls -ld /tmp/foo
[...]$ echo $FREESURFER_PATH $SUBJECTS_DIR
/projects/freesurfer /projects/freesurfer/subjects
put this echo line in your script ending with: > /tmp/checkvar
then check the file to see if is correct.
./hans