Blue Video

My home is not far from Blue Video, which has its advantages. I've never been inside mind you, but since everyone in Seattle seems to know where it is, it makes it easy to describe where I live. On the minus side, people who need funds to rent their movies break into cars and houses in the area.

Anyhow, I wanted to comment on the fact that Seattle ISN'T on the list of most depressed cities in America. We didn't make the list of the happiest cities either, but let's not get too greedy. Really, I'm pleased that we aren't so depressed any more (and it sounds like the methods of measuring this depression are believable - suicide rates, antidepressant sales, etc). I wonder if the results would have been the same if they'd looked into depressed cities back when the dot-coms were falling. There did seem to be a strange dark cloud over the city for a while. A few years later, now that all those unemployed people have found jobs or moved away, I think the mood of the city has changed. And it hasn't hurt that we've got a couple of very mild winters under our belt. The msn article about cities and depression also stated that sunshine may play a factor in high happiness, but in Seattle I would postulate that the relationship between sun and depression is a U-shaped curve. We're not happy when it's raining for days, but people also seem grumpy when it's sunny for days on end. Phoenix did wind up being a depressed city, so I guess sun isn't everything.