geographic happiness

The idea is that the place you live in "makes" you either happyor unhappy. If the place is cool, fun and exciting you will be too. If the place is slow and boring you are required to be miserable.

As one who used to sing this song, all I can say is "sing along," but the words will get old. When you decide you are responsible for your own happiness- good news- you can probably change it.

As a good friend told me, at the time:
Hey GFI!
They took the barbed wire down, you can leave. Feel free to live where you like.

Geographic Happiness, or perhaps I should call it Cartographic Happiness, is for me that which happens when I sit down and open an atlas... It's an odd sort of mental state that emerges I stare at the maps for hours, studying coastlines, rivers, borders, cities... and even better if it's a good thematic atlas. Don't get me anywhere near a historical atlas, that's just dangerous. Like chocolate, maps are a drug. When I use maps, I enter a dreamlike state, I lose hours to idleness, I forget to eat, I become antisocial and obsessed.... And then when I'm done poring over my beloved tome of cartography, a deep depression sets in as I realize that there is no more in the book, yet I need more, I always need more....