Technological Whooligals

About a month and a half ago, I proudly stepped into the 21st century and purchased my first iPod Nano. It is so tiny I live in fear that I will either lose it or break it (I am prone to freakish accidents that often wreak havoc in my wake). To date, I have successfully managed to load about 150 songs onto said thingamajiggie. Of course, when I first loaded iTunes onto my non-Mac apparatus, it instantly sucked in all of the music and videos currently residing peacefully in my hard drive. This is all well and good, except for the fact that none of these items were in a compressed format (which sort of defeats the purpose of the iPod in the first place). I figured it would be easier to just delete it all out of iTunes, and put in only those things I really wanted (I mean, after all, do I really need the Brandenburg Concertos on my iPod?), and compress them as I imported them. In theory this was a fine idea, but in actuality it turned out to be an enormous clusterfuck. Now, in what I can only assume is some sort of passive-aggressive retaliation, iTunes refuses to allow me to import any music from the hard drive. This is exceptionally annoying, since every Beatles album in existence is on my computer, and I ended up loading them manually. Once, I had considered myself somewhat technologically proficient. I have since changed my views and wonder how I could have been quite so deluded in the first place.