How Much Do I Love Being Alone?

One of my goals for this year is to go on a creative retreat. I already have an ideal location all picked out. My family shares a little house on the Jersey Shore with (gasp) no cable TV, no internet access, no extras. Just a little bungalow with a three-block walk to the beach and a two-block walk to the bay. If you're really ambitious, you can plan a five-mile morning hike up to the northern point of the island to see some beach-y wilderness, shipwrecks, and plenty of shells and driftwood.

This sounds perfect for a weekend of solitude, the days quietly passed writing and taking photographs, right?

The only problem is, as antisocial as I can be sometimes, I don't really like being alone. I like being left alone, meaning my husband works on making a video game mod while I gnaw away at my manuscript (figuratively, of course).

But while I'm happy to engage in separate activities most of the time and meet in the middle for a movie or some two-player Little Big Planet, when my husband leaves for a significant period of time I tend to get the hell out of there. Guaranteed, when he starts up his four-hour night class this Fall, I'll be calling my best friend in the next neighborhood over to schedule weekly World of Warcraft and television dates.



So I'm torn. Half of me is in love with the zen-like quiet of the shore house in the Fall/Winter, the smell and feel of the beach, the removal from everyday life. But the other half is raising a cautionary finger and reminding me I'm most productive when I'm quietly engaged in parallel with someone else. That, and I ask my friends to babysit me when I'm faced with a long stretch of time in an empty house.

What's a girl to do? For now I'm going to pencil it in and think a little bit more about what I need and how I can give myself an amazing, productive, and (maybe semi-) detached weekend.

Side note: because I was traveling for a long weekend, the weekly creative non-fiction will be a little belated. Never fear, though, it will make its appearance tomorrow!