Deborah's friend Angel started cleaning out her closet recently and has been giving Deborah first dibs on everything. Two weeks ago, Deborah came home after working with William and Angel at their furniture store, with several pairs of calf-length stiletto-heeled leather boots. White, black, tan, brown. "Which do you like best?" Deborah asked me while trying on each pair with every outfit she owns.

Signe sent me a text on Friday afternoon: "I just found out my friend Phil is having a low-key sunset BBQ on his roof in Greenpoint," came a text message from Friday afternoon. "Wanna come?"

Yesterday morning, we awoke to find our apartment without running water. No showers, no coffee, no flushing away morning dumps. I wondered if it was just our building, or if a water main broke in the neighborhood like the one in the East Village that left "Thousands Without Water" last week.

"I had one of those little trucks," my neighbor said when she found out about the used Ford Ranger I bought on eBay. "I loved it. But I wouldn't let word get out that you have it if I were you. People are gonna start crawling out of the woodwork looking for help moving their shit. You'll see."

I was a block away from where Brian and I had arranged to meet when my phone rang. "Change of plans," said Brian. "I'm at a place with the best name for an Indian restaurant ever."

Finally, a day off after what feels like a thousand years. It was only a week and a half, and I should probably be disappointed that I didn't finish out the week for a full week's pay. But the stale air and dim fluorescent light made me want to jump out the window, so I was happy to be allowed to take the elevator and walk out the front door, instead. My eyes are still dry, cramped, and blurry from staring at a computer monitor for so long. My wrist is weak and my fingers numb.

My connection was delayed due to a stalled train on the tracks further up the line. All express trains were running on the local track, which meant that all trains were twice as crowded as usual. I was already late for work, but couldn't bring myself to squish onboard a subway car that looked like an overstuffed suitcase. Shirttails, skirt hems, and backpack straps hung in the way of the doors, and it took the train operator several tries before he was able to close them. "There's a train right behind us, ladies and gentlemen, there's a train right behind us." I'd already resigned to wait for it.

There was a photo shoot outside my window the other day. It must've been a band doing promotional shots. Four or five guys huddled together, looking awkward and uncomfortable. They weren't particularly flashy, and they weren't projecting much personality, but what else could it have been? The photographer, a skinny guy with wild curly hair and sideburns, wearing black stovepipe jeans and black Chuck Taylors, had to stop what he was doing every few minutes to pull up his pants, which kept falling over his nearly nonexistent hips, revealing what appeared to be Aquaman Underoos.

After returning home from Pennsylvania, I was thrust directly into a series of long days at work. Only today, a week later, have I finally had time to unpack my bag. That doesn't mean I've unpacked it, though. It's mostly just dirty laundry, anyway.

Although the Carlyle Hotel may sound fancy -- the one in Manhattan certainly is -- I doubt the one in podunk, Pennsylvania will be. After all, it was the cheap rate that convinced us to book a room there to begin with. The hotel doesn't have a website —as Deborah said, they hardly have anyone to even answer the phone — so it's unlikely they will offer internet access. In other words, once we pack up the rental car and go, I probably won't be posting anything for a few days. We’ll see.

The receptionist at St. Vincent's Hospital directed me to the orthopedic surgeon's office, down the hall, left at the chandelier, past the portrait of the mysterious woman in black, and then further down the hallway until you come to a bank of elevators on your left, you can't miss them, and take the elevator to the 7th floor. I started down the hall but was stopped by a guard who asked me if I knew where I was going. Yes, I said, and then nodded politely while he gave me precisely the same directions.

Circus performers really do live on a train. Even when they haven't hit the road yet and are still in rehearsals, there's a train not far from the rehearsal hall where they stay. You can't go on it without being invited, though, which annoyed me until I thought about it for a minute and realized that I don't want anyone in my home uninvited, either.

My internet service is on the fritz, so I pointed my receptors into the quagmire of electromagnetic pollution and found someone else's alien brainwaves to intercept.

It's still unclear how Deborah's friend ended up in the psych ward on the eighth floor of Beth Israel Hospital, but judging from the message she left on Deborah's voicemail, it's where she needed to be.

Deborah and I rented Capote last night. Toward the end of the movie, Deborah commented that Capote's book, In Cold Blood, wasn't very long. She remembered it being fairly short, much like his other well-known book Breakfast at Tiffany's. I disagreed and said I was pretty sure the book was a full-length novel, if not a little on the long side. As it is with all questions these days, the answer was only a few keystrokes away, so when the movie was over, we looked it up online to see who was right. I headed straight for Amazon.com and began searching through the information listed for the book. If Amazon included a page count, we never found it. Instead, as is typical of online research, we got sidetracked.

After several riders complained of nausea and eye irritation, service on my train line was suspended for a few hours while police investigated. I made it to work by walking along the chilly, windswept, garbage-strewn, perpetual-construction-zone of Flushing Avenue and taking the elevated J train across the Williamsburg Bridge.

While looking for cat food in the deli, Deborah spied a dusty bag of pink and white marshmallows on the shelf and grabbed it. "Ahh! I want these!" she said.

My friends are like planets. Some shine brightly, circle closely, and I see them all the time. Others, while in a deeper orbit, are so dramatic that when they do come around, they're impossible to ignore. Still others are more like Pluto: in such a deep and misshapen orbit that it's pure sentimentalism to call them friends at all.

Morningstar commented, "You need to spend a little time outside of New York right now, Jamie." She couldn't be more right. Summer's over, and aside from a day trip or two and a single overnight visit with my parents, I spent the entire summer right here in the big city of dreams — no whirlwind European adventures, no Canadian road trips, and no African safaris.

I don’t know why the Labor Day Parade was a week after Labor Day, but a bunch of construction workers a week behind schedule didn't seem too unusual.