Unlabeled

Label:Insanity

So do you want to know what kept me up until 2 AM last night?  What do you think could be so very important that I stay up that late?  I became obsessed with cleaning out my gmail account.  Never mind my storage is at 3%!  Basically, my goal was to delete all emails to which a labeled hadn't been applied. When I view gmail through my computer, it's not a problem to delete these since I just press the delete button to delete or the archive button to save. And I never press the archive button unless a message has at least one label attached to it.

However, when I delete through my iPhone, gmail doesn't actually delete the message.  It archives it.  This means that when I delete a newsletter-type email from the iPhone, and there are no labels attached to it, it goes into this place of oblivion.  I've known about this since a week or so after I got my iPhone (so just over a year), but thought I could just Let It Go.  Not last night.

You'd think gmail would have a way to search for all unlabeled messages.  If you Google that, you'll find a lot of people want this feature.  You'll also find there are a few tedious ways to find them, though I couldn't get a single one to work.  I think they only work when you have a small number of labels.  I have 63 different labels.  Regardless, I came up with my own method for identifying all unlabeled messages.  Then I sorted through all those that should have had a label and assigned them the correct label.  Then I deleted all the messages that were intended for deletion in the first place.

What about this problem in the future, you ask?  I did actually think this through.  I also developed an easy method for identifying those messages that I "delete" (which is actually archiving) via my iPhone in the future.  It's a manual process to then re-delete the emails from my computer, but not cumbersome.  It's like keeping my spam box cleaned out.  I'm generally very good about cleaning out spam on a regular basis. 

Yep.  I did all that for a personal email account in which I still have 97% of my storage free.  Being crazy is hard sometimes. 

Medication

The next topic isn't far off from the first one: my OCD-like obsessions.  I don't officially have OCD, but I have obsessions that a layman would call OCD.  And with regards to these obsessions, I definitely notice a huge difference when I'm on anti-depressants.  On medication, I can just let things slide;  I'm not obsessed with stupid little things; I don't freak out if something isn't perfect.  All those things take up a lot more space in my mind when I'm not on medication.  I don't really understand why my OCD-like-tendencies are helped by medication, but I know beyond any doubt that my tendencies are definitely minimized.

In the last few weeks, it feels like the medication isn't performing quite as well at suppressing my OCD-like obsessions.  I've gotten in a loop on several things such that, after the fact, I'm shocked by the amount of time I've just squandered on a meaningless task (see above).

Yet, my mood is great and I am very happy in life at this moment.  As such, I don't want to increase my medication dose.  I don't want to mess with it when I'm not having any side effects from it and my mood is stable (well, as stable as any "normal" person). 

Loreto

Check out #8 on the NYT's 41 Places to Go in 2011 list.