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absent mindedness
Aug. 2nd, 2005 08:42 pmwhoooopsies.....
With everything else going on I forgot something pretty big today. Just as I was sitting down to eat lunch today at school, I spontaneously blurted out "shit! fuck! shit!" When asked what was wrong, I explained "I think I'm supposed to be in court today!"
It's true... I was summoned for Jury duty about a month ago, and I went through a lot of shit but ended up getting it delayed for a month. They rescheduled it for this week. And I remembered to call last Friday to see if I needed to report on Monday. And the recorded message said that no... I didn't need to come in Monday, but I should call back Monday evening to see if I should report on Tuesday. And my number was in the next block which makes it very likely I'd have to go in. Monday evening we had so many people come by to look at the place, and I'd been running around all day worrying about other stuff, that I completely forgot to call. And it took me all the way till afternoon today to realize it.
As I frantically searched the web for any phone number that was in some way associated with the courthouse, I realized I didn't even remember what my number was, so I wasn't sure if I could even learn anything from calling their recorded line. After a couple phonecalls, though, I managed to find an "emergency line" for people who were supposed to come in and weren't going to make it. I called that, wondering if they'd be pissed that I was using their emergency line after the fact, when they already knew I hadn't made it. But as things have been going lately, it magically turned out perfectly fine... I was indeed supposed to be there this morning at 9am, but when I asked what to do now she said "no problem, I'll just give you a new number and you can come in tomorrow instead." Whew... narrowly escaped being fined for contempt of court! :) This probably happens all the time I guess, but in the future I really need to be more careful about checking my todo list every 24 hours or less. "Call Jury line" was on there, but I just hadn't looked at it. So now I just called and verified that I need to be in tomorrow at 9am instead. As long as I don't forget by the time I set my alarm tonight, I'm good. Come to think of it, as soon as I finish typing this I'm going to take care of that.
This happens to me a lot, and it seems to be getting worse. I really need a better way of remembering things I have to do, especially when they aren't a part of my usual routine. I write everything down on my todo list, but for some reason I often forget to check it. I think I need to just set a time and start checking it at that time every day to make sure.
After that fiasco was avoided, I met with Tom Banks who just got back from various travels (Strings 2005 in Toronto, followed by a visit to Princeton). He came back with somewhat shocking news, at least to me. He wants me to forget about Matrix Theory and work on something competely different (debunking some of the Cyclic Universe ideas put forth by Paul Steinhardt and friends--whom he ran into while at Princeton). I will make a separate entry on this when I get a chance, but basically I'm a little uncertain of whether I'm going to do what he suggests or keep working on what I'm working on. I think the Matrix Theory stuff is a lot cooler, but I agree with him that it will be longer term than we thought and it would be kind of nice to get some quick publishable results. We also had an interesting conversation about Lee Smolin, whom I didn't realize was a friend of Tom's until after I brought him up. Then again, not surprising since High Energy Theory is a pretty tight circle of people who all tend to know each other at least somewhat. I recommended that he read Smolin's latest paper (which I found very interesting--from my admittedly inexperienced point of view), but he seemed pretty against the idea saying that reading Lee's papers is usually very frustrating since they don't see eye-to-eye on many things. Nevertheless, I'm hoping curiosity might get the better of him and he'll decide to check it out anyway. More on this later. Life is going by at a blinding pace; I've been writing new entries on a daily basis now, but new stuff just keeps happening and at some point I won't be able to keep up.
With everything else going on I forgot something pretty big today. Just as I was sitting down to eat lunch today at school, I spontaneously blurted out "shit! fuck! shit!" When asked what was wrong, I explained "I think I'm supposed to be in court today!"
It's true... I was summoned for Jury duty about a month ago, and I went through a lot of shit but ended up getting it delayed for a month. They rescheduled it for this week. And I remembered to call last Friday to see if I needed to report on Monday. And the recorded message said that no... I didn't need to come in Monday, but I should call back Monday evening to see if I should report on Tuesday. And my number was in the next block which makes it very likely I'd have to go in. Monday evening we had so many people come by to look at the place, and I'd been running around all day worrying about other stuff, that I completely forgot to call. And it took me all the way till afternoon today to realize it.
As I frantically searched the web for any phone number that was in some way associated with the courthouse, I realized I didn't even remember what my number was, so I wasn't sure if I could even learn anything from calling their recorded line. After a couple phonecalls, though, I managed to find an "emergency line" for people who were supposed to come in and weren't going to make it. I called that, wondering if they'd be pissed that I was using their emergency line after the fact, when they already knew I hadn't made it. But as things have been going lately, it magically turned out perfectly fine... I was indeed supposed to be there this morning at 9am, but when I asked what to do now she said "no problem, I'll just give you a new number and you can come in tomorrow instead." Whew... narrowly escaped being fined for contempt of court! :) This probably happens all the time I guess, but in the future I really need to be more careful about checking my todo list every 24 hours or less. "Call Jury line" was on there, but I just hadn't looked at it. So now I just called and verified that I need to be in tomorrow at 9am instead. As long as I don't forget by the time I set my alarm tonight, I'm good. Come to think of it, as soon as I finish typing this I'm going to take care of that.
This happens to me a lot, and it seems to be getting worse. I really need a better way of remembering things I have to do, especially when they aren't a part of my usual routine. I write everything down on my todo list, but for some reason I often forget to check it. I think I need to just set a time and start checking it at that time every day to make sure.
After that fiasco was avoided, I met with Tom Banks who just got back from various travels (Strings 2005 in Toronto, followed by a visit to Princeton). He came back with somewhat shocking news, at least to me. He wants me to forget about Matrix Theory and work on something competely different (debunking some of the Cyclic Universe ideas put forth by Paul Steinhardt and friends--whom he ran into while at Princeton). I will make a separate entry on this when I get a chance, but basically I'm a little uncertain of whether I'm going to do what he suggests or keep working on what I'm working on. I think the Matrix Theory stuff is a lot cooler, but I agree with him that it will be longer term than we thought and it would be kind of nice to get some quick publishable results. We also had an interesting conversation about Lee Smolin, whom I didn't realize was a friend of Tom's until after I brought him up. Then again, not surprising since High Energy Theory is a pretty tight circle of people who all tend to know each other at least somewhat. I recommended that he read Smolin's latest paper (which I found very interesting--from my admittedly inexperienced point of view), but he seemed pretty against the idea saying that reading Lee's papers is usually very frustrating since they don't see eye-to-eye on many things. Nevertheless, I'm hoping curiosity might get the better of him and he'll decide to check it out anyway. More on this later. Life is going by at a blinding pace; I've been writing new entries on a daily basis now, but new stuff just keeps happening and at some point I won't be able to keep up.
