Very disappointed, so far

Hello, I’ve just started using WordPress and I’m very disappointed and frustrated so far. I’m not a beginner – I’ve been blogging since 2000, so I have eight years of experience to draw from. All I want to do at the moment are very simple things such as add permalinks to my blog posts, and rearrange the categories and links in my sidebar. These should be incredibly simple things to do. Yet I’ve studied and studied the Dashboard, and still don’t know how to do either one. I’ve looked up Permalinks in the documentation, but all I’ve found is a long, highly technical page on the types of permalinks and how to do CSS (I guess that’s what it’s about.) All I want to do is have a permalink appear!! How can I just turn them on? Surely there is a way to do that?

Same with the sidebar. I’ve found the place on the Dashboard where I can change the Blogroll, and I can add new categories. What I want to do, though, is move the Blogroll category to the top of the sidebar. I’d like to eliminate the “meta” category altogether. How can I do those? Why is this so hard?

Please help, if you can.