Last Thursday was a bad day. Our tablet had been left on top of the car, which I didn’t discover until I was driving on a busy street and it fell off again. My son was being difficult, which culminated in his spreading two pounds of powdered sugar all over everything, leaving me with eight extra loads of laundry to do, including ones that had been clean and waiting to be folded until they were now covered in sugar. Have you ever been so bewildered by a mess that you just stand there and cry? There you go—that was my afternoon.

My friend Cara had to put her dog to sleep recently. She’d had the dog for about ten years, and China got sick—cancer, in fact. She did a lot of things with her dog, spending extra time with her. And then, in the end, she had people come over so that her dog could die peacefully in her own home.

Thursday evening, Cara and I went to the movies. It was vaguely planned before China got bad, and it was certainly planned before the mess, but either one of us would cancel our plans if we had felt the need. It’s happened before. We regret it, not least because we don’t see each other very often, but life happens and we both know it. But neither of us even considered missing it that night, because what we both needed very badly was to go off somewhere and laugh until we couldn’t breathe.

I’ve argued for some time that “turn your mind off” is a silly instruction that I can’t follow. I resent it like hell, in fact. On the other hand, what I routinely do is use movies to think about something else for a while. This isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to me; it comes up in Sullivan’s Travels, for one thing. Preston Sturges uses the film to argue that Ants in Your Plants of 1939 is a more significant and valuable film than O Brother, Where Art Thou? (not the Coens’ version), because laughter is the most important thing the poor have. I find that a hair patronizing, but even rich people sometimes just need a good laugh.

The other issue is that, sometimes, delving into someone else’s misery can also be distracting. I used to joke in high school that I listened to The Cure when I was depressed, because no matter how bad my life was, I was probably still doing better than Robert Smith. There are dramas I’ll watch when I’m depressed for similar reasons. A hefty enough book can do a lot for you, too, if you’re of a mind.

So okay, China is still dead. Sad but true. Actually, I got home and discovered that my babysitter had cleaned the powdered sugar out of my carpet (thank you again, Liz!), though that had killed my vacuum cleaner and also I still had to finish a ton of laundry and wash the sugar off about a hundred or so DVD cases. But I’m still better off than Cara. Graham has replaced my tablet; the new one should arrive in the mail a few hours after this posts at the latest. Cara still comes home every day to not having a dog anymore. That sucks for her, and if you guys could throw her some sympathy in the comments, I’m sure she’d appreciate it.

But you know, if things get really hard for her, she does always have the option to go sit in a dark room somewhere and laugh until she can’t breathe. Isn’t it nice to know that option is there, when things are ganging up on you?