I know most of you don't even check this anymore. Why would you? In a way, this feels like some sort of secret oasis for my petty thoughts. Ah, the imagined comfort of isolation.

In summary, life has been both beautiful and hideous. I feel as if life is one big comedy- the kind that you laugh at because there's really nothing else you can do, and it's too awkward to show no emotion at all. You can't cry anymore- your tears are depleted and even if you could nothing would be solved.

I'm at that stage.

Life has been good to me. I am the lucky one. Severe illness has always bypassed me. I had a rough start, but I'm still alive and relatively healthy. Other people, like my roommate and my father, are not so fortunate.

I wish I could bear some of the burden of what they're going through.

But in all other aspects of my life, the world is pleasant. The blister from the burn on my finger even resembles a ying yang. There's so much good left even after all the evil.

I once got a fortune cookie that said "One must taste the bitter to understand the sweet." In an extremely selfish way, I wonder if the pain other people experience is supposed to teach me some sort of lesson... I guess the point of life is to simply make the most of what's handed to you.

Without the pain of disability my father has felt I doubt I would have had the initiative to travel and experience as much as I have.

Without watching my grandmother die from lung cancer I might have smoked far more than I have.

Without watching my mother go through the pain of losing a child, I might have never realised how lucky I was to survive.

Without personally experiencing the heartbreak of losing my first love, I might have never realized how lucky I am to be with Val.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I'm incredibly lucky, and that we are really are diamonds in the rough. I'm 24, nowhere near complete, but healthy, in love, and relatively happy. The people who are struggling with some less than pleasant ordeals in their lives are going to be 10x better for experiencing what they're going through.