Being lazy (Like a fellow blogger described)

I know this is lame, but I have nothing else to write about at the moment. Today I have gotten good feedback about my column for this week, so I am going to post it. It is a cop out for writing something new, but I (with a bias) like it and hope you do too.

It is too easy these days to judge things based on their appearance. I am a journalist and on first glance could be considered a liberal blogger in print or possibly a rambler of publicly viewed nonsense.

No matter how you slice it, things are just easier for people if they are broken down and categorized. Unfortunately, they end up being horrendous predispositions about people we know little about.

To give an excellent example, I will quote an excerpt from a review by Jeremy Clarkson, a poorly dressed, giant-of-a-man, motoring journalist whose work I like to read.

"I saw the parting in his hair and knew he'd have a plasma television, an appointment to play squash that night with someone called 'Dom' and no carpets," he wrote, referring to a passing motorist he encountered while doing a review of the 2006 BMW M5.

It is safe to say that everyone does this whether they are willing to admit it or not. When we see something, someone or whatever, we take mental Polaroids and file them away in the annals of voluntary recall we call our brains.

Think of it like the movies, doing word associations in a therapist's office, saying the first thing that pops into your crazed cranium.

Clowns - convicts. Short - Gary Coleman. NASCAR - rednecks.

I was watching the SPEED channel last weekend. (See, already you are labeling me). I woke up at 4 a.m. to watch the ING Belgian Grand Prix. The seven-kilometer, 19-turn track is the 13th stop of the Formula 1 season. I know these things because I am a huge fan of international racing.

Label me a European empathizer or a fish 'n' chips flunky, but racing here in America is just not as good as it is in Europe. The drivers are better, the teams are more prestigious and the pit girls are better looking, minus the whole dental plan thing.

There I go again with the labeling. It is hard to avoid. I caught myself doing it at a dinner conversation when the topic of short-term memory came up. I simply rubber-stamped my father as "past his prime," referring to his inability to recall things he had done earlier that day. See how easy it is.

It can be something as harmless as calling someone childish or as serious as labeling someone a Nazi sympathizer, but either way, it is easy. As vocabularies of slang words increase, it becomes easier for things to become synonymous without the affected group knowing. We can thank Urban Dictionary for that.

I am sure that if I give the average reader some information about myself, within a few seconds they could form labels for me. I am a fan of the charismatic character created by the author Ian Fleming. Bond, James Bond. Witty label: a martini-sipping, womanizing, bad-guy-bashing MI6 misfit.

What is with the obsession with Europe? No, I don't want Tony Blair's autograph. As tempting as it is to label things, it shouldn't be so simple.

With how much tension there is in the world with wars, natural disasters and oil prices, it would do us all some good to keep the labels quietly to ourselves.

Sure, the emotional teen scene needs to stop buying black nail polish and the entire Spears family needs to take parenting classes, but shouldn't they figure it out for themselves?

If labeling is your thing, go ahead. Just make sure the person is not standing behind you when you publicly plaster them with prejudiced predispositions.