Why I Don't Have Labels

I think about this rather too much, I know. Please feel free to skip this, if you've had enough of the navel-gazing and whinging. Maybe you've noticed Zom needling me, ever-so-gently, about labels for my posts. She urges me to Just Do It, and I keep having excuses for Why I Don't. I thought the reason I don't do it is because I no longer have Windows Live Writer, which is what I used for blogging when I had a PC, and let me just say this:

Dear Apple People: Windows Live Writer rocks. Not having something similar is kind of sad, and it makes us worry about those of you who are doing the cutting-edge-ish stuff, in a sort of 'why are they lagging on this one?' kind of way. Please?

I had it set up so that Windows Live Writer wouldn't let me post until I'd added labels, making sure I never forgot (not unless I turned off that feature in a fit of pique, of course). So I added labels. Lots of labels. Dozens and dozens and dozens of labels.

And I just recently realized that that's the real problem. Sure, it's partially that I now have no reminder (other than Zom's gentle hinting) to label my posts, but that's not really it. I went in and looked at the labels, everything from "Abingdon" and "alphabet stamps" to "Zazzy's" (huh? I wonder what that one was about) and "zen," and I felt completely overwhelmed. Just exhausted, in the way of walking into one of those all-you-can-eat buffet places where there are about a gazillion Menu Items, all equally lacking in nutrition but also equally alluring in their steaming, colorful presentation. Where do you start?

And I realized what happened. Because I am just the tiniest bit anal-retentive (as you maybe heard me mention yesterday in the podcast with Michael Aaron McAllister) and have a deep and abiding love for organization, I can kind of get carried away. Bluntly put, I can subdivide to a fare-thee-well, and once I get started, it's difficult to stop. Give me a large bunch of anything--crayons, kinds of paper, file folders, email messages, photos--and ask me to sort it? I can do it, and I can do it so you can find ANYTHING. Anything at all. I'm a search engine's flesh-and-blood counterpart, is what I am. Cross-referencing! Divisions and subdivisions!

I've told the story before, but when I get stressed about something, it's really calming to me to straighten and organize or even--gasp!--clean. When some family tragedy has occurred in the past, something huge and overwhelming, I have either cleaned (as in: taking everything out of the refrigerator and scrubbing every inch of every surface and then getting down on my hands and knees and scrubbing the floor with a cloth) or taken over some organizational task, like translating all the medical terms in an autopsy report. Those kinds of things.

Once, at a show, my stuff wasn't selling, and I had hours ahead of me when I had to stand there, unable to leave the booth, bored and irritated and wondering why I was there. Across the aisle from me was a booth of rubber stamps, and I found myself sidling over and straightening them, aligning the edges and making neat little displays. The owner loved this, and it made me feel calmer. I had found My Purpose, at least for that particular day.

This kind of explains everything, pathetically.

And when I was labeling posts? Apparently it did go on just that long. I can see clearly now (whoa! earworm alert! and, hey, he's kind of cute, huh?) what I did wrong and what I should have done differently. Duh. I should have picked a dozen labels--broad, general categories like "artists," "podcasts," "rants," "garments," "why George W. makes me want to poke my eyeballs out with a stick." You know.

But I didn't. And every time I think about adding labels, I go in and look at all those and am just completely, totally, horrendously overwhelmed. I don't even know where to start, and I don't even want to think about it. Every single post could, theoretically, have dozens of labels. Every. Single. One. If I could somehow delete them all and start over, start, as Zom suggests, from Today and not even think about going back and doing all those hundreds of previous posts (this is making my stomach hurt, just thinking about it), maybe I could. Maybe.

But guess what? I believe that if something's so stressful that just thinking about it makes my stomach hurt? Well. Life's too short. And here's what I know for sure (Look! I'm Oprah Winfrey! Only without the money and cute dogs!): one of the benefits of getting older, being a full-fledged adult, is learning how your brain works and what it does well and what it doesn't do quite so well, what makes it happy and what's sure to set it off. Some things are so important that you just suck it up and do it anyway and deal with the consequences. Maybe afterwards a friend will let you come rearrange their sock drawer or clean out their medicine cabinet or make new folders in Mail. Other things, you put off until you have time to deal with them without making yourself crazy (this would be the 16,017 items in 999 events currently sitting in iPhoto waiting for the day I feel able to tackle this organizational Everest without leaping off a Very Tall Building (it makes me sweat just thinking about it)). Still other things are just not that important. Sure, it would be nice to have labels. Maybe someday, someday after I tackle iPhoto and clean out all those subdivided mail photos and do something about my languishing Flickr account and that forgotten MySpace page (did we ever really USE MySpace? Really?) and that Other Blog, and, and, and--

Maybe then I'll tackle the labels. But I don't think so. Still, it was fun figuring this out. It's always fun when you figure out something about your own brain, when something clicks and you smack yourself in the forehead and go, "Oh, so THAT'S it! Now I get it." Even when thinking about it makes your stomach hurt.

Maybe I need a popsicle. You think?