Battery Pack

A few weeks ago, I was sitting slumped over next to a coworker on the trusty B62 bus after a particularly trying day at work. Sidenote: Brooklyn buses are way underrated, especially when 99% of the time I'm the only white girl on board. Majken--my forever-wise bff--once told me that true closeness can be measured by the ability of two people to be together without talking. True, perhaps, but in practice I have found very few people with whom I can achieve comfortable silence. My coworker and I were really too exhausted to make spicy conversational fire, but we tried our best at dialogue because we have not reached the point of magical silence in our relationship.

When you're exhausted--together--the easiest conversation topic is exhaustion. We've all been there. "This week has been killer. I'm beat. I need to recharge," I complained to her, because communal complaining is another surefire to make conversation when you're tired.

"I know," she agreed in turn, "I just wanna go home, sit on my couch, order thai food and turn on the tv until I pass out." I thought about that for a second. She looked at me expectantly, waiting for a head nod or some verbal recognition that I, too, was heading in that direction, to a couch slightly West of her Fort Greene apartment. But I wasn't. This easy conversation just got weird.

The thing is, when I need to recharge, I want to see friends, talk to people, walk around, jam out, play games, listen to music, drink beer and go out to dinner. I want to be social and urban and friend-y. This may seem counter-intuitive because those things are exhausting in their own right, but they remind me of who I am and where I fit in. So I told her my plans. Straight up: Gonna run this town (not really). She nodded, then shared with me the battery theory championed by a friend of hers from college: Some people are alone-rechargers, and some people are social-rechargers. Simple enough. Obviously, she and I split camps. Now, the conversation just got interesting--provocative, theoretical. Okay, maybe not all those adjectives, but better than one-upping each other on the exhaustion scale--a banal game at which teachers excel.

I've never been good at alone time, perhaps because I associate it with my nemesis: Boredom. To fight that fear, I make plans, I go places, I do things. When I need to recharge, I look first to my friends and second to people I can tolerate for an hour or two. Just kidding, guys! Mostly, this is fine; I feel comfortable with my status as social-recharger. To me, though, there does appear to be a troubling imbalance, the seedy underbelly of the battery theory. It seems that while alone-rechargers are capable of socializing--and yearn to do so once fully charged--social-rechargers may have trouble simply being alone. Social-rechargers like myself may not reap the same benefits from solo-time (does that sound sexual?). I've started to worry I'm missing out on something good.

So, I was supposed to go play billiards with the PDX crew on Flatbush. Then I was supposed to go meet a guy I might like to see if I might like him a little bit more. Then I was supposed to meet my friend whose flight got canceled and is back in the East Village. But I'm exhausted after a day of grad school and the necessary day-drinking that follows and there's a monsoon outside, so I'm trying something new instead. Welcome, LEL, to alone-recharging. Clothing optional, lime popsicles in the freezer, many things to write and even more to read. Music on. Roommates out. Let's do this thing.