My City Was Gone, But Not For Long

I got in the car to run some errands and go to the bank a couple of weeks ago, and – knowing I might be waiting in line a little while – I’d taken my MP3 player with me, which I don’t usually do if I’m just running the usual errands. My MP3 player pretty much stays on shuffle.

I plugged it in and started the car, and The Inmates’ 1981 version of The Standells’ “Dirty Water” started up. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I’d go to check the weather online and type in my zip code and the next thing I’d see, on the pages with the weather forecast – ads for water damage restoration experts.

My auto insurance company has finally stopped sending me e-mails asking me if I need to get my car checked out since there has been severe flood damage in my area. No, thank you. I’m just fine.

I know there are people right here in Shelby County, and nearby, and up yonder a little ways, in just as desperate straits as people in Nashville and Middle Tennessee – and in some cases, maybe more. But still, overall – as a whole – we got off easy, here in Memphis, this time. The tornado warnings here that same weekend were pretty scary, but the last time we had a really bad storm like that, I saw debris on the street and trees pushed over dotting the landscape on my little route from here to Kroger. This time, the following Monday, I think I counted only one house that had some limbs on the curb. The north part of the county got slammed, and there were spots of bad flooding even here in the central city – but still, overall and as a whole, the majority of us, we were fine.

But you know, as far as the cities go – in a lot of ways, I’ll always be more connected to Nashville and Murfreesboro and Middle Tennessee than I ever have been to Memphis, even though I was born here and have a long history here and strong connections here, including having had strong family connections here. And probably more than I ever will be to Knoxville. Don’t really have any to Chattanooga, other than a family member living there for a while who no longer does.

But I spent some pretty crucial years in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, as well as a pretty significant number of days throughout childhood and my teen years.  My phone number started with 615 (back in ancient times before there were more than two area codes) for a good portion of the Eighties. It’s almost as much home to me as Northwest Tennessee is.

What a month it’s been. The week after the flood, I was kinda just feeling shellshocked, although I hadn’t actually DONE anything but sit here at the computer catching up on all the news in between periods of working. I kind of drifted off to Facebook for an evening on the following Monday, I think, and got into digging thru old high school photos various friends had posted, after having spent about 15 hours straight reading flood-related updates on Twitter and the Web. Feeling guilty the whole time, because I could get away from it all for a little bit while so many people I know couldn’t. Because they were right there in the middle of it.

Then I was committed to something work-wise from that Tuesday onward, and it was really the end of the week before I really had a chance at all to truly even attempt to catch up on what all had transpired since Monday and the big day of the flood. Couple being completely and totally swamped (no pun intended) with work with the fact that the fourth of the Christian-Newsom trials started that same Monday in Knoxville, which I would have liked to have been able to keep up with throughout the week but there just wasn’t enough time in the days to do so; checking on updates of online acquaintances who have been been dealing with a nightmarish tragedy of the non-flood type; and scrambling to put Band-Aid fixes on what I guess is just going to keep being an ongoing calamity of sorts here on the home front – even if I’d had four or five clones of myself, I’m not sure there would have been enough for me to go around.

So, the flood…

For the benefit of what few of you here reading don’t already read everyone else’s oft-more-updated and finer blogs in Nashville and in Tennessee, the Nashville flood finally got some national attention, though I’m not sure it really would have much if not for all the Tweeting and blogging there was about it. MSNBC was one of the first to give it decent air time, here and with another mention from Keith Olbermann that I think, in particular, was much appreciated by the community at large.

My buddy Travis Harmon – certainly the most successful of the bunch from that wide circle of friends from old ‘Boro and college days – and his comedy partner put out probably the best edition of Red State Update ever, and made me laugh (and laugh and laugh and laugh) and cry at the same time. Many of my personal friends and acquaintances up there have been volunteering their asses off all month, and continue to. I’m so proud to know all of them.

My mom – back in one of the few sectors of West Tennessee that mostly escaped both wind and flood damage almost completely last week – usually gets her faculty a little gift for Nurses Week every year. This year, she made donations in their names to one of the community relief organizations that WKRN had listed on their website instead of gifts. She said it just seemed like the right thing to do this year. I’m very proud of her too.

So many of my friends wrote great truly stuff that week. This was one of the very best, as was this post that led me to it. This was another one that particularly touched me. This angry one from one of our own forced to watch it all unfold from thousands of miles away clear across the country, expressing all the frustration pretty much all of us who still had power and Internet access were feeling that day. And pretty much everything over here all week long, but especially this one. I wish I could list more, and there are more I probably haven’t gotten around to seeing yet as I’m still (always) catching up. But they all outdid themselves on the writing thing that week, especially those many that were smack dab in the middle of it all.

Most everyone I know was okay and while many had flooded basements and such, overall everyone I know made it through and, most importantly, alive and uninjured. I’m thankful for that. I know everyone up there, though, has continued to be almost all exhausted beyond belief, though, mentally and physically.

I still have a little bit of a nagging worry – because I have known SO many people throughout my life from all over and have been fortunate to have made many friends throughout – that news has yet to turn up that won’t be as good. I think I’ve now accounted for most everyone I “need to know about” – if not directly, I’ve seen them Tweet or someone else mention them on Facebook or Twitter or on the phone – and have racked my brain all month long trying to figure out who hasn’t crossed my mind that should have by now.

One friend who didn’t get too lucky was an old college friend and ex-boyfriend who arrived home after a week in Chicago to find thousands of dollars’ worth of musical instruments, studio equipment and gear swimming in his basement. He was prepared for it, as his neighbor had been able to reach him by phone and warn him, and luckily the water damage was limited to the basement only – by about a half inch below the upstairs door. It was a too-close call for the rest of the house, but things could have certainly turned out much worse.

Unfortunately he got hit by a double whammy, though, as he still owns and rents out his mom’s old house in Bellevue, and it was nearly completely submerged. Last we spoke, which has been a while now, he still didn’t know where his renters had fled to, but presumably by now they’re probably some of the folks out there having to sift through and throw away most of the entire contents of the house. I know he sure wasn’t looking forward to the expected hassle forthcoming with his insurance company and was already preparing himself to be SOL.

Lots of teary moments that week, often over the oddest of photos, of all the many horrific ones that were hitting the Internet out of Nashville and Middle Tennessee. Lots of times just sitting there gaping, open-mouthed.

Highway 96 from Murfreesboro to Dickson was my usual route back and forth between college and home for me. Naturally, if I had five bucks for every time I was back and forth on I-24 between Murfreesboro and Nashville, whether going out downtown or going to work, I could have probably retired on that. I worked at Southern Hills, so you Middle Tennesseans know what my usual route to work was. To see that intersection in Franklin on 96, and those stretches of I-24, with cars and trucks nearly completely submerged – just surreal.

The (current) Opry House, which wasn’t very old when I attended a rock concert there in the garishly neon, New Wave, how-many-items-of-Esprit-clothing-do-you-have-in-your-closet days of 1983. My friends and I thought it would be a kick to get matching outfits made for the event, and – though they were each made of different colored material and design – we all showed up in matching camouflage miniskirts (with equally matching skinny ties) and just about every color of chunky neon jewelry you can imagine. I think we probably all looked like Catholic schoolgirls, except in camouflage instead of plaid – which I guess was unintentionally ironic, since we were from a small town in West Tennessee where dates on the weekend during duck and deer season ended at 8 pm, because your date had to go home and go to bed so they could get up at four in the morning and go shoot stuff.

So I was looking at the flood picture of the Opry stage that first week, and in my head seeing clearly what the stage looked like from the floor, standing in the third or fourth row in from the stage that night in 1983. Remembering that I was looking, basically, up – since I’m short anyway, but still, it was relatively high off the floor.

Realizing that that water I was looking at in the picture was quite a bit – a lot - higher than I am tall.

I wrote in a post that’s yet to be published that the Opryland Hotel’s what really did me in, sifting through pic after pic as I was early in the week. I know it’s silly, and I know they’ll repair it and build it back. It’s just seeing a place like that where you have a really strong, clear and special memory so devastated – that’s when it really hits home, when you’re having to watch like this from afar.

And speaking of home over here in West Tennessee… although I had heard and read about and seen some of the horrible devastation in Dyersburg, pictures that were forwarded to me of the flooding in Jackson struck it home even more.

Though things have progressed a great deal in many of the smaller towns, when you’re from Northwest Tennessee, Jackson’s a big hub – that’s where you go shopping for Christmas or your prom dress, that’s where you go to the orthodontist once a month, where people end up in the hospital when they have things more severe than the smaller ones can handle, where folks go to the doctor regularly – all those things. Many friends and old classmates live there. I lived there once briefly too, matter of fact.

The pictures from Jackson were as awful as the ones I’d been seeing out of Nashville and Middle Tennessee all week. A main stretch of road with vehicles as submerged as all those pics from I-24. A Sonic Drive-In with water up to the lighted menus, menus that are generally quite a bit higher than the bottom of your average car door’s window.

Virtually almost all of West Tennessee, as well as so much of Middle Tennessee, has now been declared a disaster area by the Federal government. Of my two little hometowns here in the West, one is in one of only maybe two or three counties in West Tennessee that were not. My other home county is.

I know a lot of people who were watching from other places on Twitter and Facebook and the like, and folks from other places reading Nashville and Tennessee bloggers’ blogs – and probably especially people who live in cities and areas that do experience such devastating flooding fairly often – maybe thought we’d all gone mad, overboard with it all.

But it just doesn’t happen here. Not like that.

Not but in a few pockets of the state (like up around Reelfoot Lake and off the Mississippi to the north), and certainly not like this. And absolutely not in this state’s largest cities.

Tornadoes – we know tornadoes, yep. We are all too familiar with tornadoes. Maybe not quite on the scale of, say, Kansas – but we know tornadoes.

Floods like the one earlier this month – they just don’t happen here. Not at all in Nashville since the 1970s – and bad though it was, that was really nothing compared to this one.

So yeah. Most of this state, except for those in the mountains in East Tennessee – we’re a little loopy right now, still. We’re better than we were, but things are still pretty bad for a lot of people down here. We’ll be okay, eventually.

But so much help is still needed, and will continue to be. It was heartbreaking a couple  of weeks or so ago to see one of my friends who’d gone out to volunteer and help Tweeting for more help, because apparently a lot of elderly people showed up at the location and she was only one of a few (if not the only) volunteer that showed up. I know a lot of major relief efforts went on all the following weekend after the flood, and I’m sure the larger ones have been more successful than that one was. I hope not too many of the smaller ones had problems like that one did.

It’ll be a long ongoing process for a long time, and daunting. In Nashville, the potential economic repercussions alone are a little bit terrifying. Not only are many of Nashville’s biggest landmarks and tourist attractions, and other large industries, going to be under repair for some time – some of the largest are out of commission for possibly the rest of the year at the very least, and literally thousands of people are about to be (or already are) without jobs.

And the same goes for other places in Tennessee, with varying degrees of what and how much those counties are going to be hit economically. In a state that has already been struggling with disastrous state budgetary issues, widespread unemployment, and general economic downturn statewide for some time now – it’s no wonder if everyone’s holding their breath to see where we go from here.

Some resources for those who want to help (many of these are also aggregating efforts for other Middle TN counties as well):

• The United Way of Metropolitan Nashville – you can also text RESTORE to UNITED (864833) to give $10 to help victims of the Nashville flood.
• Hands On Nashville – also in the process of major relief efforts for Nashville
• DonateNashville.org - a Craigslist-type resource recently put together by The United Way of Metro Nashville and Cool People Care to more efficiently organize directly what people need and what people have
• The Red Cross – you can also donate $10 to the Red Cross to help the flood victims by texting REDCROSS to 90999
• Cool People Care also has some great “We Are Nashville” t-shirts for sale with proceeds going to help flood victims

Speak to Power has put together some listings of resources for help, donations and more in several of the worst hit counties in West Tennessee also:

• Dyersburg – Dyer County Relief & Donation Resources
• Tipton County Relief & Donation Resources
• Shelby County – Millington Relief & Donation Resources
  

My hat’s truly off to Christy and Morgan (and anyone else helping behind the scenes that week) at The Nashvillest, who did an outstanding job of collecting, organizing and getting information out on the Web through this whole ordeal that week and just really became the central point of Internet communication regarding the Nashville flood and continue to be. I should point out, too, that the website is not their job – they have full-time jobs elsewhere – yet they still managed to kinda outshine the local print and television news media when it came to the WWW. The local media still did a good job and continues to, but in this situation, they kinda got pwned as far as getting critical information out on the Internet goes.

(Sadly The Tennesseean‘s website, though better than it was in the past, is kind of a great big cluttered mess and I really don’t know how anyone finds anything on there. Messy, messy, messy. I’m not a big fan of the Scripps template that The Commercial Appeal and the Knoxville News-Sentinel are using these days, but it’s 110% better than the garbled cluttered up mess I see every time I go to The Tennesseean looking for something. And while I know newspaper and television news sites pretty much MUST have ads on them these days, and that’s fine – it’d be nice if someone would come up with a solution for nearly all of the media sites nationwide where advertisements wouldn’t cause the page loading issues they do. There’s nothing more annoying than going to your local TV news station’s site when the tornado siren’s going off outdoors… only to see the page hanging FOREVER when it’s trying to load via some ad supplier’s domain.)

Anyway, so there. I would say that’s all, but yesterday the floods came back and a little too close to home for me – way too close to home for many of my friends.

Summer hasn’t even really begun in Tennessee and, this year, I don’t think winter can come too soon.

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On a final note – I’m going to make a valiant attempt to start posting again at least a few times a week, if not more. Even if it’s stupid. I’ve been so busy for so many months now and it really has been almost impossible to get here and post most of the time. But I feel better when I do, so I’m going to make an effort again and guess we’ll just see what happens. I’ve decided it wasn’t just because the week of the flood was so grim and critical – it just felt better, being on Twitter more, being here more. So there you go. It might get really dumb around here, but I guess that’s okay too.

Oooooh….. Shiny!

Sorry posting’s been a bit light again. I have got a ton going on this week, but I’m also… (ahem)… playing with WordPress.org – and I am just rather enamored of its sheer awesomeness.

My mad techgeekchick skillz don’t seem to be serving me that well this time and I feel a little bit like a newbie trying to learn Windows 3.x all over again in that respect – and there is just SO much stuff!!! – but it’s pretty neat and I’m having fun. And have fallen in love with the hosting company (Host Gator) after my yucky experiences elsewhere (I won’t say who, but feel free to ask me which companies to avoid at all costs). I actually made a spontaneous decision (based on the recommendation of a WordPress.org expert) to jump over there after pulling my hair out for hours trying to install and update a WordPress blog where I was, and when I got set up at Host Gator, I had the thing on and live in less than five minutes (as well as some really cool other stuff that came with the account).

I’ll let you guys take a look at it when I get a little more moved in and situated. I don’t project that I’m going to move the Zone over there  – well, maybe someday, but I’m still rather attached to WordPress.com and even though it’s probably dumb of me, I never really wanted to put any advertising on the personal blog and whatnot. Now, the music blog, that might be another story – but I’m not jumping ship from WordPress.com with the personal blog anytime soon.

This new adventure is pretty cool though, I’m getting a kick out of playing with it. I just hope I don’t break anything, eek.

Well That’s A Pleasant Surprise…

Finding a new Twitter widget in your WordPress dashboard that you didn’t know was there is pretty cool for a Friday the 13th.

Wonder how long that thing’s been there without me noticing…

The State of Volunteer State Dudeblogging

I had had this rather damning post on the backburner in draft for some time where I was going to cry and whine and moan about the fact that “most” of my fave Tennessee dude bloggers that I’ve been reading for years had pretty much hung up the keyboard.

But then since I originally started that post and left it sitting in my drafts eight or ten months ago, two things have happened. First, two of the ones I was going to pout about most  – CeeElCee and FreakyWeasel – showed up again. Yay! (Well, actually FreakyWeasel never left, just nobody told me he’d relocated. I went to his old blog one day and was shocked to find him gone, and when I asked about it, everyone was all quiet about it like it was some big conspiracy so I didn’t ask again.)

And though it’s been a while now since his return, Roger also came back, which made me and a large portion of the regional blogosphere all happy and stuff.

Anyway, then there my other discovery, when I got to looking at my blogroll – I discovered less of the dude contingent had dropped out than I’d really realized, which I suppose part of the reason it seemed to be like “all” the men had quit was because so many of the ones that went MIA were just huge favorites. Still, there are loads of dudes I like to read still out there – Mike, Michael, Christian, Joe, Jack, Jackson, Kleinheider, Jon, Michael Silence, Chris, Jeffraham, Sean, Wally, Mack, Frank, Rob, and Ron (who’s not a Tennessean but we kinda adopted him), to name a few. And a few more I’ve picked up along the way, like Steve and Steve.

And then there are some that aren’t writing much lately, but still show up from time to time and I’m thankful for that – LeBlanc, Jon, Slarti, and the very much missed (and not Tweeting lately either!!) Hutchmo. I’m glad you guys are still around, I wish we’d see more of you though. And these two, too.

So I guess my originally months ago intended post about how the blogger women were kicking the men’s butts bigtime by still going at it when all the dudes had quit is unwarranted and unnecessary now.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the heck out of reading Sarcastro, Knuck, Rex, and Kerry Woo any less, even though three of the four still entertain me on Twitter regularly. (ADDED: I knew I’d forget someone here – Russ. Who also still entertains me on Twitter regularly, but still, dang it.)

If somebody misses reading you, I bet you’ve still got something to say. Sigh.

Faking It Like It’s Real

Sometimes I forget that not everyone who stops by here is in the mix with the Nashville blogging crew (and by Nashville I actually mean mostly Nashville but some Memphis and some Knoxville and lots of other parts of Tennessee and also some non-Tennessee cities like Louisville and well, you get the idea). I probably should have posted this closer to the beginning of the month but ah well, it’s still early October.

Over at Tiny Cat Pants, Aunt B. created this really super cool little project for October that you should go check out. She’s posting one ghost story a day, every day in October.

The thing is – they’re all fake. But the other thing is, they’re all based around facts and known legends in Nashville, Davidson County, Middle Tennessee in general.

She has just done an absolutely outstanding job weaving together these legends and historical facts in with spooky hooey – so much so that I keep forgetting the stories aren’t real.

A fine time’s to be had this haunted season over there, so go check ‘em out every day, there’s a new one up every evening. They’re easy to spot among the rest of the blog posts because there’s a nifty interactive map on each one, and they’re numbered. (But heck, read the rest of the blog while you’re there, too – that’s one I read religiously daily).

I can’t decide which one’s my favorite so far – this one or this one – but I’m sure that’s going to change again as the month progresses.

Nope, Not Dead Yet

Well, hello there. I bet you maybe thought I wasn’t coming back, unless you’re on Twitter and in that case you knew I was awake online again. Pffft, I always come back eventually.

This blog will be 13 years old in February and I suppose it’ll still be here 13 years from now. Or somewhere anyway.

There’s really not much to say – which is kind of ridiculous because I bet I’ve had 100 blog posts written in my head. It was a really trying summer. Things are (maybe, hopefully) getting a little better now.

We lost Little, the last of the elderlies, a couple of weeks ago. She was a very old kitty at 17 or 18 (I never can remember which year she came here), and had been very sick for a long time, so it was time. The oldest four-footed thing in my house right now is 12, which seems odd. Everybody else is fine. I’m still trying to get used to not having a dog around that is scared to death of thunderstorms (and rain) anymore, or fireworks. Instead Dobie’s niece and nephews bark at fireworks, which is certainly more annoying.

There’s more, I’m sure, I’m a bit sleepy this morning though so this will be short. I thought we were supposed to have thunderstorms today, so I stayed up through the night working, thinking today would be a good nap day. Silly me, I practically need sunglasses indoors today, it’s so bright.

Hopefully anyone who’s subscribed via feed will get this. I discovered accidentally, several weeks ago on the MMH blog, that Feedburner had been scooped up by Google (thank goodness not Yahoo which now has its hands in my AT&T mail which works like crap now), and stuff had changed and I needed to migrate the feed, so hopefully this post is showing up both on feed and in MyBlogLog.

Also, unless you’ve got the feed or never had anything but the WordPress link, you may not even know I’m still here yet since I’m having a little bit of a disagreement with my domain & web host (i.e., they suck and their account re-up tactics suck even more). I’ll straighten that out eventually, but for now you can bookmark/link @ http://thelynnsterzone.wordpress.com/ – same for the music blog except it’s lynnstersmusiczone – it’s always been here anyway and will never change.

More later, I’m yawning despite the wayyyyyyy too bright sun.

Anorexia Jetsonia

I haven’t really been in a blogging mood, which I guess has been kind of obvious.  And I hate that, because I have let something slip by on the music blog I absolutely did not mean to, but maybe I can get myself sort of re-motivated into things next week.

Anyway, no, I haven’t really been in a blogging mood, and apparently I’m not in an eating mood either.  Which is kind of bad when you only eat maybe once a day and sometimes not anyway, which is kind of good when you’re almost too poor to eat anyway, but I know it’s not good and healthy to only eat maybe once a day and possibly even not.

I DO get hungry.  It’s just that there’s nothing I want to eat, and if there is, after two bites I’m over it.  Stuff I have eaten and liked my entire life – I don’t want it and/or it doesn’t taste good.  Everything is just totally blah.  In a way it’s a good thing that I don’t eat much when I eat anyway, but it’s just kind of disturbing to get two or three bites into something and just be like totally unable to finish.

The only things I really want to eat are breakfast food or Mexican food.  But the way things are going – even though I’m too destitute to be able to go out to eat – if I COULD go eat at Cafe Ole every night this week, I’m afraid by night #2 I would be over that too and not want that either.   Or Waffle House.  Which is totally unimaginable to me that I could go in either and not feel like eating anything on the menu, but there ya go.

I was kind of jonesing for some Pancho’s today and like I said, Mexican food is one of the few things that sounds good these days.  So since I had to go to the grocery store anyway, I picked up fixings for nachos and grabbed some Pancho’s dressing too and that pretty much satisfied the craving AND I did actually eat and it was good.  Except I ate so little and there’s so much left that I could probably eat for the next week… and now I’m a little afraid I’m going to lose my appetite for the one thing I always have an appetite for.  Plus I ate so little, but so way much more than I usually do, so now I’m stuffed and miserable.

I bought some bananas today because they looked good and appealing – which I’m sure I will eat.  I like fruit, I just don’t buy much because normally most would wind up going to waste.  Maybe I should just buy fruit for a while.  But what if I start not wanting to eat fruit either?

Weren’t things supposed to be like The Jetsons by now anyway, where you just took a pill and bam, that was an entire meal, and we all fly our cars around instead of driving them and – right?

Oh Hai

I am just knee-deep in fifteen tons of stuff right now and don’t really have any time for anything but the HAVE-to stuff right now.  That’s my explanation for the quiet.

Well, that and I don’t really have anything to blog about at the moment.  I could gripe about the fact that I got the phone call last night from the ex that I knew would eventually come (because it always does, eventually) and had dreaded for the last nine years, but I really don’t want to talk (or think) about that either.  It went okay, I suppose, depending on what your definition of okay is.

And a few weeks ago one of my e-mail accounts started getting overloaded suddenly with Greek spam, which I find the phenomena has now wended its way to my blog comments and the Akismet bucket.  Weird.

Other than that, I got nothing.  Newscoma’s down sick this week and posting all kinds of wacky stuff from the newspapers over there as well as other interesting stuff – go visit her and see.

Wanderlust

My friend Julie and I go back a long way. We went to high school together a class apart, then later shared an apartment for a while during college. She was already in Memphis when I moved down here in 1988, and not too long after that gave birth to her first child, which began a journey for her as a single mom that was always simply amazing to me how she hung in through some unbelievably difficult times, but she did it all like a pro.

Since then she’s become a mother twice more, the last born earlier this year, after she’s already been a grandmother for four years. It’s rather tickled me that she’s a year younger than me but the grandmother of a four-year-old (I should be shot, I know). She’s been out in Utah for about 17-18 years now. Many moons have passed since the days of our old apartment up at MTSU where we used to go to sleep at 6 a.m., get up about 6 p.m., watch MTV all night and throw empty beer cans at Martha Quinn whenever she was on.  Oh, and sometimes go to class.

Julie’s always been adventurous in a way I never dared to even think about being. After a period of living and working at Utah’s Seabase, she and hubby decided to pack up the kids, cats, and I dunno what all else in the camper and hit the road and just wander a while. The kids have always been homeschooled, and hubby has a job where he can telecommute, so they’ve been able to just wander as they please this summer. Most recently they’ve headed back to Salt Lake City (where she was forevah) so Julie could do a month-long stint volunteering at The Breastfeeding Cafe events and classes.

She’s been blogging her adventures from the road, and it’s been a really interesting read thus far. So meet my Gypsy friend – she’s taken some really cool photos along the way too.

Tags, Categories, Labels, Topics, Subjects – Ahhh, Identifier Overload!

So maybe I’m just being unusually stupid about something I’m not usually so retarded about, but why would I want to use categories AND tags too? What’s the purpose?

Any WordPress (com or org) folks want to enlighten me on this mystery? I know tags suddenly appeared out of nowhere in my WP dashboard several months ago, but I can’t honestly think of a reason to use them unless I’m just missing something really important. Categories have always suited me just fine and this tag box is kinda in my way, unless there’s really some infinitely important reason to be using them.