Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain starts out with a guy lost in the desert babbling about “quantum foam”, the super tiny low-level “fabric of the universe” made up of super-tiny particles.

Been feeling like there’s a lot of that in my life right now, metaphorically speaking - little tasks that you can’t even think about or enumerate, because talking about them takes more time than just doing them. But there are a lot of them, and you have to remember them all and do them all.

Here are some examples over the last week or so:
- switch the credit card I have signed up for Lastpass after my old card got frauded
- call like 3 banks to say I’m traveling (oops, forgot to do that, cards haven’t been blocked yet, knock on wood)
- activate new credit card
- call bank to change address on new credit card because they still had an old address on there which was screwing me up for some reason (see? I can’t even remember, it’s just all foam)
- water plants
- fold laundry
- plan thing for some friends I have coming into town soon
- send a thank you note to someone at work who’s done a lot of work on an old project of mine and it’s finally getting published
- vote
- blog/facebook about voting
- confirm something with the videographer (what thing? I don’t remember)
- decide whether to go camping with some other friends (unfortunately, no)
- plan a birthday party because I’ll be in town again then
- invite friends to said birthday party, worrying all the while that I’m forgetting someone
- send Tati a venmo charge for some groceries
- reply to tweets that came in at CHI
- pick up a prescription
- plan dinner with a friend
- go to doctor because I have a sudden sore throat right before traveling (turned out to be nothing, huh)
- email a old friend
- check if the wedding venue has glassware
- investigate disposable glasses for our wedding because they don’t
- worry about if anyone will think it’s suuuper tacky if we have disposable glasses (answer: no, deal with it)
- pack clothes for Germany trip
- file reimbursements for previous conference
- shave
- bottle kombucha
- respond to a comment about a paper review
- update wedding registry so people can buy us more stuff, because some of the categories we’ve run out of. (people like to buy you fancy lodging on your trip. huh.)
- blog about a conference I just went to
- type up this blog post

By my count, 4 of these are brought on by social media increasing our feelings of responsibilities, 6 are because of a wedding, 5 are because of work, 4 are hobbies/fun things I bring upon myself. There’s not even any one culprit. As a result, my brain always feels full.

Man, how do we even do anything? Yeesh.