One of the annoying things about being autistic is that I am compelled to categorize things. In my specific case, my obsession seems to be ensuring that all my mp3 files are tagged properly. While the merely neurotypical may be satisfied with song name and artist (and many NTs probably don't even care enough to tag that much), I try to also get the album artist (which may differ from the track artist), the date of release (not just the year), the current track number, the total track number of the album, the current disc number, and total number of discs, and the BPM.

Genre is nearly worthless to me (it's regularly subjective, unlike the other aforementioned tags), and I wish it could be replaced with a set of web 2.0 style tags (e.g. so that I could tag the song as being: {bemani, instrumental, jazz, latin}, instead of arbitrarily choosing one of those keywords as being the genre.)

I also wish I could notate time signature, and BPM changes, and time signature changes, at the specific moments where they occur in the song. Along with that, I would like to notate where the first beat of the song lies (e.g. is there 300 milliseconds of silence as an intro, or 450 milliseconds?) With that, your music software could do automated beat mixing.

I mentioned that this obsession is annoying. The reason it's annoying is that I fully realize the transient and useless nature of this data. If I were providing all of this data into a central database, that'd be an entirely different matter. I'd be contributing to (the segment of) society (that enjoys music, and data about music). But this is my personal mp3 collection. When I die, someone's probably just going to reformat my harddrive and destroy all my work.

So in this next paragraph, I was about to write something along the lines of "Clearly, the rational thing to do is to just not bother tagging. This is one of those rare times when I can't seem to bring myself to do the rational thing, and this one big blatant exception feels like a character flaw." etc. However, in the process of writing the previous paragraph, (the one which starts with "I mentioned that this obsession is annoying"), I was googling for those buddhist monks who spent a lot of effort drawing complicated stuff in the sand, and then destroy that picture. I was googling for that 'cause I was trying to find a specific term often used when discussing this. I couldn't find it, and "transient" was the closest word I could find, and that's the word I used in that paragraph.

So while preparing to write the paragraph that would have started off with "Clearly, the rational thing to do", I was subconsciously thinking about those monks, and then I thought to ask myself "Why do they bother? What exactly is the lesson they're trying to teach?" Yes, I know they're trying to demonstrate the transient nature of life, but why bother to draw all of that stuff if you already know life is transient? And the revelation that came to me is this: You do whatever you need to do to get through life. That means, getting a job, paying rent, buying food, etc. But you can also enjoy life. When the monks draw that stuff in the sand, it looks really good. I think they get a sense of satisfaction and joy from seeing their own creation and work of art. In other words, these monks are drawing 'cause they like to draw. And who cares if their drawings will be lost forever, if it's the act of drawing itself which they enjoy?

So whereas I started off writing this post with the intent to gripe about how annoyed I am with my own irrationality, I can now reconcile my behaviour with utilitarianism by realizing that I gain utility from the act of tagging mp3s itself. Who cares if my metadata will be lost forever, if it's the act of tagging the mp3s itself which I enjoy?

When I phrase it like that — when I say that I enjoy tagging mp3s — it sounds pretty weird, geeky, sad, and boring. But that's autism for you.