A lot of people complain about Seattle.

Actually, everyone who's not from Seattle complains about Seattle. And I think it's completely legit. First and foremost, it rains way too much here and at the worst time of the year: winter.

I mean yeah, forget that per-year there's more precipitation in cities like Boston and New York. One can liken the difference between Seattle and New York to a faucet that drips incessantly a lot of autumn, all of winter and the whole spring, versus a flood in the basement that you can get angry about, fix and move on. When you've got a dripping faucet most of the year, who cares that Seattle has one of the best summers around.

The fact that I can't wear my sandals and shorts during the holiday season is completely unacceptable. To the people who do wear them during the holiday season, I need to know your secret to warding off hypothermia.

How was I supposed to know I was getting into this mess? I haven't lived here in six years, and I really, truly thought Seattle had changed for the better. You would think with all the global warming going on, a city near the ocean would be sunny year-round, like San Francisco.

The depression began to set in even before I came here my freshman year, because whenever someone asked me where I was going, it always led to the same conversation:

"University of Washington? Wow, St. Louis sure is a long ways away."

"Actually, I'm going to the University of Washington state ... in Seattle."

"Seattle? Well, why the hell would go there? It just rains all the time!"

I wasn't caught by surprise when I arrived here late September last year, and it was sunny for about two months. Then it rained for almost 28 straight days.

That's 28 consecutive days of the leaky faucet dripping on my head. By day 25, I felt a flood of biblical proportions might have been more bearable. I remember when that sun finally came out, I felt like I was being born again. I was even happy to see the ever present guy walking around Red Square with a giant picture of an aborted fetus and condemning me to hell.

If that's not reason enough to be depressed, we just had the wettest month on record. Needless to say, if I ever hear the song "November Rain" again, I'll send Axel Rose a death threat. No joke. If that isn't enough to demonstrate how depressed this city can get you, then you obviously haven't paid attention to the cultural movements that have taken place here.

For instance, legend states that many years ago, during an exceptionally depressing morning, Kurt Cobain opened his window, saw clouds and became so pissed off that he decided to put his anger into song. With that, grunge music was invented.

The sad part is the fact that during the past decade, we've become so filled with despair that grunge music just couldn't do it for us anymore. Thus, we have moved on the next best thing: emo. We went from refusing to wear bright colors or undamaged jeans to an even more adament refusal to wear colors and ... well, undamaged jeans.

Another common misconception the common civilian has is the reason Bill Gates got into computers in the first place. It was not because he saw the vast potential it would have in creating a new way of looking at business and the world, but because it rained so freaking much that he never got the opportunity to go outside and practice his jump shot.

Finally, there's the story of how a man named Howard Schultz noticed that the local workers at Pike Place Market were falling asleep too often because it always looked like it was 7 a.m. outside, so he decided to expand a little café in hopes that it would awaken the locals and eventually take over the world by becoming a new form of crack.

Seattleites consume so much caffeine that if we tested raindrops, we may actually find they contain caffeine. If that's the case, we can all gather in our ripped jeans, get the guy with the bullhorn from Red Square to blare Nirvana, use our Windows XP-equipped laptops as makeshift pillows and drink the stuff as it comes down from the sky.

Cobain, Gates and Schultz have tried their best to help us overcome our daylong and nearly yearlong grief, but to no avail. We continue to live day and night with the hopes that sooner or later we will be able to pack our bags and go somewhere a little nicer. Like Pullman.

Reach columnist Eric Uthus at ericuthus@thedaily.washington.edu