Yesterday there was the flurry of phone calls that involved me hanging up on Jeff maybe three times in a row—“Wait, lemme call the girl with the keys, and I will call you back.” “Wait, it’s my mum, I have to take this.” “Okay I’m all yours, wait, it’s the girl with the keys, I will call you back in a second.”—before we got our act together enough to meet at Kelley & Ping for a little luncheon. Lunch and a midday movie like the unemployed high-lifers we are.

I seem to remember an article in the Times a while ago—needless to say, we are talking the City section, or the Sunday Styles section, unless we are talking the new bubbleheaded Thursday Styles section—about People in New York City who are able to sit about at Three-hour Lunches, buying each other noontime glasses of Champagne or fancy water.

(The Thursday Styles tangent is, today’s Styles includes a full-page story on rugby shirts being the new new thing for boys who care about fashion:

“This is sexy rugby,” said Robert Burke, the fashion director for Bergdorf Goodman, which is doing a brisk business in jerseys with four-inch-wide stripes (or “hoops” in rugby parlance) in fine-gauge cotton knit. Bergdorf purposely made the shirts more fitted and tapered. The smaller sizes sell best, suggesting that fit and fashionable customers are the buyers. “These are not the XXL guys,” Mr. Burke said. “You don’t want to see that coming at you in a stripe, whether he can play rugby or not.”

Mr. Burke, that quote is GOLD. People. You understand how we needed an extra version of the Sunday Styles to get through the week?

Meanwhile, the Thursday Styles always makes me think of my friend Lurlene, for rather roundabout reasons, which are these: I came across the first issue of the Thursday Styles section at the Sullivan Street Bakery, one happy day when I stopped in for a slice of rosepetal crostata. They have newspapers lying about at the Sullivan Street Bakery so a girl can sit on a vintage tin chair with both reading and eating material to equal an altogether A-plus midday break. It was some other lucky day I stopped in at the Sullivan Street Bakery, maybe for a zucchini-gruyère slice or some other likely treat, when the paper on the table was the House & Garden section with a front-page story about the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury. It was the sort of story you cannot just sit and read in silence, the sort of story one must immediately call Lurlene about. I can’t really explain why; maybe it is just because somewhere in my head I understand that Lurlene is quite possibly the Dowager Marchioness of Nashville. In any case: Thursday Styles-Sullivan Street Bakery-Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury-Lurlene. It is perhaps not so convoluted a path after all, and it is certainly less meandering than the path that has brought us to this point.

But I—you know it—I digress.)

I think the reporter in the story about lunch spoke with a “filmmaker,” a “writer,” and some lady with big jewels. Oh, as I write this I feel like I might be making it all up, it is too good to be true. In any case, me and Jeff, we are all of them put together, and so much more. That’s right, I am claiming my spot as the lady with big jewels, me in my dangly heart earrings, “gold” earrings, bought for eighteen dollars from a skinny girl by a makeshift stand on Broadway.

Nobody bought anybody fancy water at our lunch, but—OH NO WAIT, totally Jeff bought Jeff a bottle of Perrier—so alright: Jeff bought Jeff some fancy water and bought me lunch, and then I bought him a movie—James Dean in “East of Eden,” the kind of old-timey movie where the yellows are yellow and the blues are blue, where passion is spelled with a capital “P.” Afterward, outside the Film Forum, Jeff said: “I wish James Dean were alive, and he were my boyfriend.”

Man, I wish James Dean were alive, and he were packing all my boxes for me.

I had to do a whirlwind clean when I got home, ’cause Jason’d invited himself over to cook me dinner. Mother, are you reading this? This is not Jason the gay. Oh, god, I really hope my mother isn’t reading this. Neways, the point is, the whirlwind clean was done with an light heart. I will do a whirlwind clean anytime if a boy is coming over to cook me dinner.

With the mess sequestered in one room, the living room is bare bones and echo-ey. It feels good, this clean slate, this clean state, which is just as well, because take-off is in four days and counting.