Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

The one with a call to jury duty

We have very few civic duties to perform. One of them that comes around from time to time is jury duty. Today was my day to fulfil my civic duty and show up for jury duty. Fortunately, the courthouse is not very far from my home. Getting to the courthouse was easy enough. Arriving about 20 minutes early meant that parking was pretty easy. They have a lot of parking at the courthouse. People seemed to be a little stressed and every time somebody coughed people looked around. It felt a little bit dramatic, but the fear in the room was real enough. This room might be large enough to hold about 50 people. Assembling the jury is the first order of adventure for the day. We all filled out paper forms and signed them by hand. Nothing that occurred during the assembly process was digital.

Just a few minutes after the start time on the card the first person was dismissed from jury service. Only one of the people that attended was very vocal about not wanting to serve on the jury today. Everybody else in the room just seemed to be keeping to themselves and preparing for the day. Last time I went in for jury duty they dismissed me without any explanation. I just figured it was due to my education level or something. Right now I’m writing and thinking about how hard it is not to touch my face or rub my eyes in this room. It is strange to sit in a room with so many people where nobody is trying to talk or really make eye contact. I’m normally very outgoing and willing to talk to pretty much anybody at any time. That time of social interaction was not occuring at all today. Maybe it is due to the heightened stress people are feeling.

My shirt has a nice large sticker on it right now that says juror in capital letters. All I can think about is about getting things done. My mind was racing with the question, “If today was the only day left, then what should that time be spent doing?” The answer would probably be finishing the audiobook version of Graduation with Civic Honors. That is something that will take a few hours and would probably be net beneficial vs. the effort. One of the big problems with my do the most impactful thing you can every day to drive things forward philosophy is when things take more than one day to complete. Sure you can try to break things down into smaller parts, but some things just do not work out that way. Creating something new or coding something might take a lot of time. Well understood things can be broken down and understanding it helps make defying it easier. Tackling the big things takes a lot of dedication.

It is much easier to sit around and watch television than to sit around and write, create, or build something. Yes —- some people are capable of doing more than one thing at a time and that is fine. Doing something and doing nothing at the same time sounds interesting. I typically write and listen to music at the same time. The music part of it is just something that happens in the background; it does not hold my attention. Sometimes that distracts from purposeful writing. Really engaging at 100% and putting everything you have into creating prose is sometimes a different type of artistic expression. It can be completely and utterly exhausting. This exercise of writing while waiting in the jury duty room has produced 600 words of prose. None of it was exhausting. However, this is more an exercise in commentary mixed with stream of consciousness than a critical exploration of modernity. This is just a look at my thoughts and my reactions to the things happening around me.

After about an hour or so of waiting the judge dropped by the juror assembly room to advise us both trials for the day had been postponed and everyone was free to go home. It was super anticlimactic, but that is how it goes sometimes.


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