This morning I finished reading Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson. It’s an intellectual history of humanity from the earliest humans to the beginning of the 20th century. It’s a big, long, sprawling book, and I learned a lot from it (much of which I have promptly forgotten).

In the introduction, Watson puts forth his candidates for the three most important “ideas” in human history: the soul, the idea of Europe, and the experiment. He doesn’t really explain why until the book’s conclusion, about 700 pages later. In short, the non-Western world — specifically, Islam, India, and China — were on the rise until about 1000 A.D.; Asia was dominant politically, technologically, and intellectually. But the period from 1050 to 1200 was a “hinge” during which Europe started rising. This time period — the era of the university, of Thomas Aquinas, of the spread of learning and the concepts of measurement and accuracy — was more consequential than the Renaissance. He contrasts Plato — who focused on the spiritual, incorporeal world, and on the idea of looking inward — with Aristotle — who focused on the real world, and preferred to look outward. The 11th and 12th centuries were the rise of Aristotelian thinking in the West, whereas the Renaissance is one of many inward-turnings throughout history, in the mode of Plato. Scientific discovery is cumulative — discoveries lead to other discoveries — whereas artistic accomplishments are not, and it is science that has led us to where we are today.

Toward the end of the book, Watson lashes out at Freud. Watson seems to hate him. He cites several authors to argue that Freud lied about much of his work and pulled his ideas out of nowhere. Watson says the idea of the unconscious is bunk, as is psychoanalysis, and that science is the only way we will eventually discover where consciousness and the concept of the “self” come from.

He is pro-science, anti-introspection. Read this very short interview to get a taste of his ideas. He seems kind of nutty — daydreaming and introspection don’t get you anywhere? Really?

But it’s a fascinating book.

Oh my god. GOP chairman Michael Steele has a blog on the new GOP.com, and the first entry is horribly, horribly written.

Does he really not know to write? Or is he just pandering to the GOP’s anti-intellectualism?

The Internet has been around a while, now. But, I still find it an amazing platform for innovation, not just in technology, but in life. Beyond admiring the way it powers so many inventions and businesses, it has become a personal thing for me. I love the fact that, wherever I might be, I can use technology to see my family and chat with them, and Social Media to tap into what my friends are doing.

Unnecessary commas, unnecessary capitalization and a dangling participle, and that’s just the first paragraph.

To the Editor:

Re “A Library to Last Forever” (Op-Ed, Oct. 9):

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, writes, “Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.”

Fly??? I’m pretty sure I can e-mail a reference librarian and ask her to check holdings before I do anything so drastic as fly. Hasn’t this guy ever heard of the Internet?

Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Danbury, Conn., Oct. 9, 2009

So, Republican senator Olympia Snowe has announced she’ll vote for the Baucus committee health plan.

You know what’s absurd? Olympia Snowe is a “centrist,” and if, for some reason, she had switched parties a few months ago and decided to become a Democrat like Arlen Specter, her vote today would be just another example of partisanship. But because she happens to have an R after her name instead of a D, her vote is oh so important and the Democrats must win her over so we can have bipartisanship.

Ridiculous. If there were 99 Democrats and one Republican in the Senate, the Democrats would still be wringing their hands over that one Republican’s vote.

This is my favorite site of the day. Great to use after someone tells a joke. Even better to use after someone makes an ordinary declarative statement.

Happy October 8.

In Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, the author, humorist Dave Barry, has a running joke that every important event in American history happened on October 8. (I think October 8 is actually his son’s birthday.) This book came out when I was in high school, and I remember my friends and I — including occasional commenter on this blog FI — reading it aloud and joking about it on our train ride to school. (Yes, we were all a bunch of dorks.)

So, happy anniversary of everything.

In therapy last week, we decided to explore my time in law school. I seem to be haunted by it. I feel like there’s this piece of elastic that constantly pulls me back to 1999, the year I graduated and left Virginia for good.

I told her a story that I hadn’t told her before. And I’d forgotten how sad and angry the story made me.

I got through three years of law school at the University of Virginia without putting down any roots, without leaving any fingerprints behind, without leaving any evidence that I was ever there. I made no good friends. I didn’t become close with any of my professors. I didn’t join any law school organizations. I tried out for two law journals and didn’t get picked. I was intimidated by everyone at law school, students and professors alike. I rarely spoke up in class unless called upon. When I’d been younger, I could take solace in knowing that if I wasn’t cool, I was at least smart. But in law school, everyone seemed cooler than me and smarter than me. I had nothing going for myself.

I was a ghost.

My grades didn’t help, either. At UVa Law, as in many law schools, courses are graded on a very broad curve. (Your grade is based on a written final exam.) About half the students in every class will get a B plus. You don’t get higher or lower unless you do very well or pretty badly. Me, I got a mix of B pluses and Bs, and in a couple of classes I got a little bit lower than that. No wonder my first-year law firm interviews never went well.

None of this made me feel any better about being in law school, of course.

There was, however, one class in which I got an A. It was a class in U.S. constitutional history up to the Civil War. I took the class during the fall semester of my final year of law school. I was thrilled when I got my grade. After all this time, I’d actually gotten an A! Maybe I wasn’t an idiot after all!

The thing is, the professor didn’t know me. It was a class of about 100 people. During each class session, there were three or four students “on call,” meaning that they could expect to be called on during that hour. Professor Harrison went down the roster alphabetically, so you had a general idea of what day your name was coming up. I had actually kind of looked forward to the day I’d be on call. Now, I can’t remember if he wound up not asking any questions on the day I was on call, or if he was out sick that day and forgot to pick up the list in the same place when he came back, or what, but for whatever reason, I never got called on.

So a couple of days after I got my fall grades — a few weeks into the spring semester — I decided I would try to get to know him. He was a little pompous, but I thought I should get to know at least one of my law school professors, and why not the guy who’d given me an A? I could let him know I’d gotten an A in his class and ask him what I’d done right so that I could apply it to other classes. Of course, I knew the reason I’d done so well on the exam was because it hadn’t been a typical law exam where you apply legal principles to a set a facts, so there was really no way to apply it to my other classes, and I worried that that’s what he would tell me. But I couldn’t just say to him, “Hi, I got an A in your class. Please like me!” So I needed a pretense.

That afternoon I saw him walking down the hall carrying a few books and notebooks. I took a deep breath, determined to swallow my fear. I walked over to him and said:

“Professor Harrison, are you on your way back to your office?”

He replied, in a cold, irritated voice:

“No, I’m on my way to class.”

“Oh — sorry,” I said.

And he continued walking down the hall, leaving me behind.

My face and neck turn red with embarrassment.

I never tried to speak to him again.

I told that story to my therapist last week, and I felt my eyes well up a little as I told it.

She said it was interesting to ponder the possibilities. What if he’d just been a little bit friendlier to me instead of dismissive? What if I’d been a little braver or forthright?

Maybe nothing would have happened. It was too late in my law school career to change anything. But maybe I would have been able to stop by his office and have a conversation with him. Maybe it would have been just one conversation, but maybe that one conversation would have made my day. Maybe I could have gotten a recommendation letter from him in my subsequent job search.

Instead, he dismissed me like a worthless ant because he had no idea who I was. And I was too intimidated to try again.

I’ve always felt bitter about that.

Just another reason why law school sucked.

Bikers. Can I just say, as a regular pedestrian, how much bicyclists in the city piss me off sometimes? Most cyclists are fine and obey traffic rules, but there are also those who zip through red lights when I’m about to enter the crosswalk and those who zoom down one-way streets going in the wrong direction and nearly run me over because I’m looking in the direction from which traffic is supposed to come. (The latter are usually deliverymen.)

I get the impression that these people think they’re so superior because they’re not polluting the atmosphere by driving a car and they’re getting some exercise, too. They need to realize that although they are not drivers, they are not pedestrians, either. Cars can kill cyclists, but cyclists can seriously hurt pedestrians.

It’s like the old cartoons where dog > cat > mouse. The car is the dog and the bike is the cat and I’m the mouse. Cyclists need to remember that they’re in the middle of the food chain, not at the bottom.

Today I voted in the New York City Democratic primary runoff. I’d never voted in a runoff election before. There was hardly anyone at my voting place.

I voted for Bill de Blasio for Public Advocate and David Yassky for City Comptroller.

Polls close at 9 p.m.

Uh, someone was asleep at either NYTimes.com or the Associated Press this morning.

Looks like it’s already been fixed.

Turns out another gay blogger thinks Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times is kinda cute, too.

Yesterday I drove a car for the first time in five years. We were at my parents’ house for Rosh Hashanah this weekend, and I decided I needed to get some experience behind the wheel again. I want to take some New England vacations in the future, and it would be nice to rent a car and just drive out of the city for the weekend on a whim. I haven’t had a car since 2000. The last time I drove extensively was five summers ago, when I rented a car on a business trip in San Diego.

I used to drive all the time. I’d drive back and forth between college and law school in Virginia and my parents’ house in New Jersey. I’d drive all over Virginia. I’d drive around New Jersey when I moved back home. I drove all the way out to Colorado and back one summer. I don’t miss owning a car and paying for gas and maintenance and insurance and having to worry about accidents and such, but I do sometimes miss having that instant mobility.

I worried if I’d remember how to drive, but it came back to me instantly, and instinctually. First I took one of my parents’ cars out for a short spin by myself, and it was exhilarating. I can still drive!, I thought. A little while later I drove my brother and sister-in-law’s car with them and Matt and my brother’s best friend in tow. I wasn’t totally smooth behind the wheel on that second trip, and I scraped the right tires against the curb while squeezing between a stopped car on my left and the curb on my right. I guess I’ve forgotten how to properly judge car widths.

But it’s a relief to know that I haven’t forgotten how to drive and that if I need to do so, I probably can.

This makes me think.

I haven’t written much here about politics lately. I’m just demoralized and fed up with all of it. Democrats won the presidency and the largest Senate majority of any party in 30 years, and yet we can’t get anything done. Harry Reid lets the Republicans threaten to filibuster anything they want, to the extent that the country and the media now think it is normal for all legislation to require 60 votes to pass the Senate, as if it has always been that way. You can bet that when the Republicans take control of the Senate again, they won’t care about winning a single Democrat over for anything, and they’ll throw a temper tantrum if Democrats even think of threatening a filibuster. And they’ll get the media to go along with them. They’re just better at manipulating the media, because they know the media loves conflict and simplistic stories, and that’s what the Republican Party today is good at. Conflict and simplistic stories. What liberal media are the conservatives talking about? Fox is one of the most influential media voices today. Fox is the media. It’s not liberal. If anything, the rest of the media is corporate media, not liberal media. Please.

And now the Senate thinks it’s a good idea for people to bring guns on Amtrak. Once again, the conservatives have changed the terms of the debate. What does a “well regulated Militia” have to do with bringing guns on a train, or to national parks, or to churches? What does defending yourself from some imaginary government takeover have to do with bringing your gun to a national park? So now a big chunk of Congress thinks it’s okay for criminals to have guns, don’t worry about background checks, hooray, guns for everyone.

There are many good things about this country. But one of the worst is that so many Americans think the world stops at the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Maybe it’s not just an American thing — maybe most people in the world think their country is the greatest and that there’s nothing that any other nation can teach them. Maybe it’s just a natural human impulse to resist change.

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger.”

In other words, better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know.

And yet — what Bush and the Republicans did for eight years was anything but conservative. Invade another country on false pretenses? Lock people up without charging them with anything or letting them see evidence? Those things might be conservative in a macro sense — i.e. compared to most of human history, those things might be typical — but compared to the way our country had acted for the previous 200 years, it was radical change. And they were able to get their way. Why? Because they knew how to use fear to manipulate the public. So maybe it’s not always that those who resist change have an automatic advantage. Maybe, as I said at the beginning, the side that is better at manipulating people with simplistic answers has the advantage.

I don’t feel like analyzing this anymore right now. All I know is that we’re in a situation where the Senate is more lopsided toward the Democrats than at any time since 1979 and for some reason the Democrats are worried about winning over the vote of Olympia Snowe. Let alone some members of their own caucus. It annoys the hell out of me.

End of rant.

The easiest way to get me to go batshit insane is to make lots of noise around me when I want silence. If there are people being loud in another apartment, or outside, or yammering on a cell phone on the commuter train, I get some form of inner Tourette’s. I just get uncontrollably angry. It’s this physical reaction. I don’t always express it, but I feel it. I don’t know what the deal is.