In high school, I had to read Antigone, the famous play by the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles. I didn’t like it—I think you could more accurately say I didn’t appreciate it—but I did sort of enjoy reading it. I tried reimagining it as a Marx Brothers screenplay. King Creon was Groucho, the blind seer became the mute Harpo, and Antigone’s sister became the Margaret Dumont character, with whom Creon/Groucho continually flirted.

I didn’t actually write this, but I did write one line that I still think is pretty good. “I am aware, of course, that no ruler can expect complete loyalty from his subjects until he has been tested in office,” Creon/Groucho declares at one point. To which I added, after an imagined pause: “After that, I don’t expect any.”

I start with this because I realized recently that one of the things I do to stay creative and take annoying situations lightly—two different things there, so a double use—is to sort of pretend I’m a character in a sitcom, and each annoying thing that happens is a little vignette.

I had to pick up my visa from the Chinese embassy recently, and they give you this little handwritten pink receipt to pay upon pickup. It happened that I was also supposed to pick up dry cleaning that week, and our dry cleaners also gives you a little pink receipt. I triple-checked that I had the right one when I went to the embassy, but I imagined seeing the pink receipt inside my wallet, going to the embassy, handing it over, and having the guy at the counter raise his eyebrows at me and say, “A suit, a shirt, and two dresses, sir?”

In other words, I had sort of prepared myself to see the comedy in the situation, in the event that somehow I really did bring the wrong receipt. And I think that would have made the schlep back from D.C. and then back in a little more bearable...