I must say, I've got it pretty good.

When I can fall into an irrational depression because I accidentally bulldoze a great house in The Sims, I'd say I don't have too much to worry about at the moment. It's particularly insignificant when it's one of the original houses that came with the game, and after a little internet searching, some dead ends and frustrations, then a realization, I get the house back and move my Sim in.

I'm not a seemingly well-kept man in relatively clean clothes with a backpack asking people waiting for the bus in Port Authority if they'd be so kind as to dig up $4.50 among them because, according to him, he was quoted one price on the phone and now they're charging him another to get from New York to Philadelphia. I'm not standing there at Gate 200, my voice clearly shaking, reduced to begging.

Nor am I a 27-year-old wife and new aunt in San Antonio with a dashing husband working long hours in his residency who comes home to a miscarriage, 10 weeks into what was expected to be their first child. It happens in 40 percent of pregnancies, apparently. It happened to my cousin's wife, it happened to my aunt � not related to the aforementioned cousin � at least once, maybe twice, but I wasn't yet 9 when her first daughter was born, so my memory is cloudy. As for my cousin, we're going to his house for dinner tonight and to see his 8-month-old son. My aunt is preparing for her older daughter's high school graduation this week and, come September, an empty house for the first time in 18 years when one child starts college and the other leaves for her junior year of high school in Ecuador.

At times it's tough to remember that things happen for a reason. But I guess we have to tell ourselves it's all part of life, a check on ourselves to perhaps reconsider our priorities, to return a phone call or an e-mail, to remember to put an old adage to use and count our blessings or stop and smell the roses.

Sometimes you just have to slog through the sewer to get to the rose garden, I suppose.