Why do I sometimes react aggressively, impatiently, after, say, listening to a lecture or presentation? I've been forced to sit, listen to something without responding. So I want to get up and mix it up with the speaker, even when the talk itself is not all that bad. A recent example: a "Freudian" approach to something or other, where the appeal to Freud seemed utterly gratuitous. In other words, there really was no need to delve deep into the psyche to explain this particular phenomenon, which seemed quite obvious on a fairly pragmatic level. Yet my approach to asking the question was far too intense; it was unjustified, since the talk did offer other useful things unrelated to my objection.

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Modesty and immodesty interact in strange ways in my psyche. I hope that "damn it's good" in the last post is not seen as unduly immodest. It was simply a record of my honest reaction to re-reading my own blog. I wanted to make a record of this immodest thought in this record of all of my thoughts.