I recently bought new watch batteries.

As much as I’m sure you’re fascinated by my domestic errands — remind me to tell you about getting my jewelry repaired and going to the dry cleaner — that’s probably not especially interesting on its own.

I am a type A girl who owns five watches. I’m a little obsessive about punctuality: it stresses me out to be late and offends me when others are late.

So I took it as more than a coincidence when I got down to one watch with a working battery, and that watch died out of the blue on Easter Sunday in New Orleans.

You could see that as running the car out of gas, letting one watch after another die without getting new batteries, then finally the last one falls. That’s fair.

But I also took it as something bigger.

On our two-month sabbatical in New Orleans this spring, I observed a culture with a different relationship with time. Instead of racing from one place to another shouting into a cellphone on the way, New Orleanians are more prone to amble, maybe chatting with someone they bump into along the way, and get there when they get there.

I arrived in New Orleans with a lengthy to-do agenda, and promptly got laid out by a bug that left me as sick as I’ve been as an adult. I spent my convalescence observing how it was recalibrating my pace of life, as I was simply too weak to do more than amble.

Then a few weeks later, my watch died. Rather than buy a battery the next day, I took it as an opportunity. I stuffed my watch in my suitcase and lived without.

I could still check the time on my cellphone or iPad. But I’m not one to pull my phone out repeatedly in a social situation, so without being able to discreetly glance at my wrist, I often just lost track of time.

I decided to bring this watch-free lifestyle with me back to New York, and one especially lovely evening hanging out with a friend on a school night, I was shocked and pleased to discover it was 2 a.m. We’d been having such an enjoyable conversation that the hours flew by, without my watch tsk-tsking at me that I should get to bed.

I didn’t take it lightly, this decision to buy new watch batteries. Several months passed before I decided I’d absorbed my more zen relationship with time, but that a lifestyle with meetings and obligations is easier with a watch.

I recently had another of those mildly irresponsible school nights, staying out until 2 a.m. with girlfriends. This time my watch kept me fully aware of the choice I was making to rely on caffeine to make it through the next day — but I think my watch-free experience helped me realize time is a tool, not my boss, and in some moments, it’s worthwhile ignoring it.

I no longer pledge allegiance to the time …
youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZKR-6jf_2o