I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.

Some suggestions for you :

Cohabitation seems a greater leap in cities because it's all the harder to extract oneself if things turn sour. It's what keeps otherwise functional adults living with their mothers.

I was the youngest of my entire family so you are tap-dancing to try to get the attention of your older cousins. I really hit my social stride in 6th grade, but before that I was a pretty big dork. You learn how to be amusing and how to work for it.

When you spin a globe and point to a city and actually go to that city, you build an allowance of missed opportunities on the back end.

We've come to expect so little from online privacy measures that public displays of concern about the matter are more or less for show. Being devastated to discover you've been tagged in somebody else's photo has an air of the melodramatic about it at this point.

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

I now know my right from my left and my up from my down. Unluckily, my terrible sense of direction remains. For me, to live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never ever make a smooth entrance, always to get caught looking lost on the street.

I write on weekends, on vacation, and, really - on deadline and on my floor. Both terrible for the back.

Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

Yes. I am writing full-time. Which is strange. It feels like not having a job.

I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn't grow up here.

Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.

I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.

I used to think that nails-down-a-chalkboard was the worst sound in the world. Then I moved on to people-eating-cereal-on-the-phone. But only this week did I stumble across the rightful winner: it's the sound of a baggage carousel coming to a grinding halt, having reunited every passenger on your flight with their luggage, except for you.