Disaster Preparedness - NYTimes.com You wonder how you would react if you didn't know any better. If there were no warnings, no wind-flapped newscasters standing in rivers-come-lately, no tin shelves cleared of water and bread. What then? Would you just go about your day thinking, I guess it's really autumn now, huh? On Sunday there was an undeniable energy in the air. Undeniable if only because New York City's streets, bars, restaurants and bodegas collectively agreed on its undeniablility. What was in the air wasn't a storm system, exactly - it was bits of overhead conversation. All you had to do was stop at a crosswalk, let the circulation come back into your fingers after carrying all those plastic bags of bottled water, and listen. What you heard was a glimpse into what it must be like to live on Capitol Hill or in Hollywood - everyone was having a version of the same conversation. Starting Sunday, social networking sites exploded with photographs of people's pantries, still life after still life of bottles of booze, noodles, a package of Swedish fish and a caption: "Disaster Preparedness!" Why do we make mass quips about the distinct possibility of forced hibernation? Maybe it's for the same reason most of us intentionally ignore the location of the oxygen masks on airplanes. We figure: If we're going down, that's that. Or perhaps it's that even the too-cool among us need to feel part of a community at times like these. Or perhaps it's simply part of the modern condition to take pictures of food as digestive foreshadowing. After the weak showing that was Hurricane Irene last year, who could blame us for being flip about Sandy? But I would argue that our flippancy isn't just hubris and humidity. Instead, it stems from New York's complicated social idea of an emergency. We know what to do logistically. We know to buy batteries, shut the windows and turn up the freezer. But then what? Regardless of the outcome of the storm, the loss of power we fear is the kind that comes with overreacting. It's nearly impossible to find the balance between overreacting and underreacting when you're trying to gauge eight million reactions to the same event. Where is the line between becoming an isolated premature hunker and a jet-skiing moron? Even after the lights had, indeed, gone out (I wrote this in a race against the battery icon on my computer, one block north of where a building facade caved off a hotel, turning it into a dollhouse), I wasn't certain of what was appropriate behavior. Monday night I got skittish, decided not to venture out to be with friends and loved ones uptown or in Brooklyn. Instead I stayed home, texting those people and listening to WNYC by candlelight. Not the most socially risky hurricane. I peered out my window at the street-level flashlights, fell asleep to the sound of a neighbor's multiple orgasms and thought: Well, this was an unnecessarily cautious course of action on my part. This hadn't been my plan 24 hours earlier. I remembered the 2003 blackout as being 20 percent inconvenience, 80 percent adventure. But Sandy's "energy in the air" finally got to me. During brunch Sunday morning, I sat at a booth in a normally crowded SoHo restaurant. Already people were fleeing the city or locking themselves in their homes, panic eating the boxes of cookies they had just purchased. I met a friend from Los Angeles who was unable to go home. We ordered omelets and wondered: Would these be our last eggs before the gas shut off and the water ran out and all the chickens in America had perished? My friend had spent her life dealing with impact-based natural disasters - tornadoes as a kid in the Midwest, followed by earthquakes as an adult in California. So her fear about the storm was far more naked than mine. Her memory told her that a house could be there, and then, in a matter of seconds, it could be elsewhere. I was purposefully blasé with her. But on Tuesday, I woke up to find that my friend's fears were warranted. Subways flooded, hospitals lost power, people were fatally wounded. It takes two seconds to write a joking tweet, and it takes two seconds to pay attention and know where the oxygen masks are. I'm not suggesting one is right - I think both are right. As a New Yorker, the line between "in case of emergency" and "smack dab in the middle of an emergency" can be unclear. On the one hand, our city prides itself on being tough, keeping a level head. On the other, we are not above imagination: We have seen the horrifying footage of Katrina, and we've been to the movies. New York may major in romantic comedies, but we minor in post-apocalyptic suspense thrillers. "The Day After Tomorrow" alone turned us all into experts in spontaneous bird-migration patterns. After we finished brunch on Sunday, I announced, "I'm taking some of these," and grabbed a couple of boxes of matches as we left the restaurant. "Oh," my friend's eyes widened, "good idea." I didn't tell her this, but I took them because I have an affinity for cute-looking matches. Most of the time I don't even use them. They just sit in a jar in my kitchen. But after the power went out, after I took them out of my pocket and lit the candles, I was careful to blow firmly on their charred ends before I put them in the trash. The last thing I needed was to do something dumb like set the house on fire. Townies welcomes submissions at townies@nytimes.com. Sloane Crosley is the author of the essay collections "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" and "How Did You Get This Number."