Jake: You mean what act of anxiety am I in.
Paul: Oh that's interesting. You say act of anxiety.
Jake: Because it's an act, not a stage.
Paul: So you're familiar with the works of Roland Barthes.

Roland Barthes was a French philosopher of the twentieth century. He wrote A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, in which he describes waiting for a lover as a play, with the prologue ending with the person's realization that the other person has not arrived on time and the three acts proceeding as Paul describes: first, questioning whether the time or the place of the meeting was miscommunicated, second, anger at the other person for not having shown up, and third, anxiety about whether the other person has been hurt or killed, preventing him or her from arriving.