I was 22 when I took my first solo cab ride. I was 22 and a half when I hailed my first taxi. I was 23 when I was first certain I was being ripped off by a driver. ($25 to get from Park Slope to Bushwick? Really?)

There are no taxis where I come from. There are trucks. And 8-wheeled trailers. And four-wheeler ATVs. Growing up, the closest I came to a yellow cab was sitting in a bucket seat surrounded by peeling buttercup paint on my father’s farm-use vehicle. In a small town with no public transportation (aside from school buses), there was no need for taxis. Everyone had their own wheels. And you better believe tractors count.

After I left the county with no stoplights, I moved to Washington D.C. Then Chicago. Then New York City. As I gradually increased the size of the population around me, I also increased the frequency with which I take taxis.

I like cabs. They generally make me carsick, but I find that they’re a great place to have… moments.

One of my favorite rituals was taking a taxi from Midway airport up Lake Shore Drive and to Lincoln Park, where I lived in Chicago. My apartment was about three blocks from the water, so most of the trip was spent with glorious high rises on my left and steely Lake Michigan on my right. I usually flew back in the evening, so all the buildings were lit, and most of them were close to the road. I loved feeling the dark, moving expanse of the lake on one side and catching glimpses of fancy art and track lighting on the other.

It was on that same Lake Shore Drive that I was once taking a cab with three visiting friends. It was a frigid — and I mean bone-freezing — January day and we were off to meet other friends at the Shedd Aquarium. We’d taken the bus downtown, but due to my er, miscalculations, we overshot Shedd and couldn’t bear to stand outside waiting for a bus in the opposite direction. After an icy ten minutes, once our arms were frozen in an upright position, a cab finally stopped and we clambered in, all yodeling for the driver to turn up the heat. It couldn’t have been ten minutes later that we merged onto Lake Shore Drive and blew a tire. The driver pulled over. Philip, one of my friends, gallantly offered to help repair the tire. Rachael, Jen and I stayed in the car. Philip and the driver soon gave up and we were told to get out and find another vehicle. Chivalrous (and shiver-rous) Phil stood on the narrow strip of snow beside a streaming highway for almost 20 minutes trying to get an empty cab to stop on the side. Finally he did. Memories.

I’ve been in cabs that hit other cars. I’ve been in ones that came so close to crashing that one of my impeccably mannered New England WASP friends, who never says anything more offensive than “oh, shoot” exclaimed “Jesus Christ! Are you a maniac?!”

I was in a cab, coming home from a bar with a friend I was preeeetty sure was intrigued when I invited him back to my apartment. “Two stops,” was his only response.

A taxi was taking me to a cocktail party (I was wearing impossibly high heels, poorly suited to subway surfing) when I found out one of my best friends was engaged.

As I get older and spend more time in transport in taxis, I can’t help but feel a fondness for them. They’ve been around for some of my finest moments.

I like Christmas. I like the gift-giving because I’m generally a very good guesser when it comes to figuring out what someone wants. I like the food because it involves showing off one of my few skills (The baking, not the consuming. Ahem.). And I like writing holiday cards.

Throughout my life (short, if you’re a octogenarian, long if you’re a caterpillar), I’ve built a reputation for writing really great cards. I’ve made people cry, made them laugh, made the least likely to write back respond within days. I have two penpals in the military, both in Iraq, but more impressively, I have an astounding 100+ greeting cards ready to be sent to eager friends. (I counted them just for this column, and I didn’t include the sheets of special handmade paper or sticker collection.)

The December month for me is filled with red candles, baked goods of all kinds and events, like last week’s gingerbread-house decorating party.

The month is also packed with cards. Lots and lots of greeting cards.

I have about 75 people I MUST send a note to and about 50 others that I ought to write. This year, I’m having trouble getting started on my list. Perhaps it’s because, to date, I have received ONE card. And it’s from a former editor so it practically doesn’t count.

It’s also because the past few months have been some of the hardest in my life. Joyous and full of progression and movement, but hard. Very hard. So what do I write in my cards? I can muster the usual non-sequitur jokes, the goofy signature, but I worry I won’t have much news.

It’s my first year in the working world and I find it difficult to keep track of successes as concretely as I used to. In internships, you finish the employment. You get a recommendation. In school, you complete a course, you build toward your major. In my graduate school, you get a piece published. There are built-in ways of measuring progress and success. Two -ess’s I’m finding very important to my life.

In the year (almost) that I’ve lived in New York, I can tick only two things off my list. I got a challenging job and a beautiful apartment. They weren’t easy feats, and I am certainly not taking them for granted, but the -ess’s are scarcer than they used to be.

I’ve made up for it in other ways. I’ve become — those of you who know me will howl with laughter — a bikram yogi. This means I practice high-intensity, fast-paced yoga in a 120-degree room for 90 minutes, five days a week. This is not the focus-on-the-end-of-your-nose, tinkly music kind of yoga. Last week, I made it through my first session where I completed every posture. To put this into perspective, for the first week or two that you practice bikram, the goal is simply to stay in the room for the full 90 minutes.

I signed up for a pottery class, and I’m working on ways to practice (and hopefully revive) my Spanish skills. All of these are in an effort to create goals that can be easily understood in terms of accomplishment.

But holidays are about ham, not hamstrings. Chimneys, not kilns. Nobody wants a card about that.

Last week I spent more than $150 buying calendars for 2010. I bought one for my desk, my house, my purse, my parents and several friends. I bought them as serious gifts, as jokes, as reminders of our impending doom, and mid-binge, I realized jut how important and personal a calendar is.

At my job, we have a calendar function. When you add something to your schedule on any given day, you can make it public or private. Most of my appointments are public (which should tell you something about the riveting life I lead). In fact, months ago, for November 9, I wrote “turn 24, eat cake” and forgot to make it invisible to my colleagues.

I tend to put everything on my personal calendar. Birthdays (my own and others), errands, grocery lists, subway poetry. Library due dates (riveting, I say!).

My life is my Moleskine.

Which is why, when faced with the prospect of junking my 2009 datebook, I couldn’t. Couldn’t do it to 2008 either. In fact, I have a shoebox full of old event planners from my first year of college till now. I never look back through them, but it comforts me to think that if I were to turn to April 14, 2006, I could see that I had coffee with a friend who I’ve since grown away from, or on January 1, 2004, a first date that turned into a relationship. In some way, these calendars are like an unformed memoir. They’re an unedited record of the way I spend my time, which almost makes them more valuable in reconstructing the past than the greeting cards and movie stubs I ordinarily keep.

Having a crisp new calendar feels like a luxury. My first step is to fill out the first page with my name and address. In the Reward if Found section, I write “karmic retribution.” Then I add my friends’ birthdays and anniversaries. Because I’m 24, sitting on an island in the middle of the Marriagiatic Sea, I put five upcoming weddings in my book too.

I am very particular about how I treat my calendar in the early stages of our relationship. I use the same-colored pen for every appointment, the same style of annotation and try to write as daintily as my grandmother did.

It is truly a shame that neat writing does not prevent messy living.

The color, style and artistic interpretation of a calendar is also very important. For years, I bought wall calendars of my favorite artists — Alphonse Mucha and Erte — and a black Moleskine to carry with me. This year, I chose a calendar with art from Maxfield Parrish, known for his children’s book illustrations. It was this picture, Solitude, that did it for me:

Something about living in New York, without air or ether or sunlight or silence, made this seem truly calming. I thought it might be nice to think of the art on my calendar as a form of fantasy along with the emptiness inside.

So really, $150 is a small price to pay for a blank page.

It offends me that there are oodles of books about growing old gracefully and none of them are aimed at 20somethings. I turned 24 last week, and I’ve had a crick in my brain ever since.

Twenty-four seems old. I can’t help feeling it’s a milestone at which I should have more on my “done it” list than I do. (I suspect this reveals more about the enormous expectations put on my generation than it does about my personal achievements, but that doesn’t make it any better.)

You see, now it’s not really feasible for me to continue blowing around as a member of the “just out of college” group. Now I’m supposed to be gearing up for some kind of quarter-life crisis or a cocaine addiction or both.

But the scariest part about 24 is that it’s almost 25. And 25 holds a lot of weight for me. When I was a little girl, maybe 7 (at that point I would have just gotten out of my refuse-to-wear-pants stage), I envisioned 25 as the prime of life. I saw myself in a city, with lots of girlfriends who did things like lie on my bed with magazines and eat chocolate (we would magically look like we spent each day in constant movement, sculpting gorgeously lean bodies with hair, nails and teeth that showed we were spinach-eating, water-drinking health nuts).

I envisioned a happy job, saw myself walking past desks with a snappy joke for each coworker. I imagined getting nicknames from my boss and published in important magazines. A stunning success at such a young age!

There’d be a man in the picture, obviously. Not the one I’d marry, but someone I’d be with for two years or so. He’d be homey, handsome and a hardworker, and I would look back on my time with him fondly.

I don’t know where these visions originated.  My idea of my ideal self is equal parts Edith Wharton and Edith Piaf. With a pinch of Myrna Loy. I’ve always been susceptible to thinking perfection is possible, and I have decided to examine my old Martha Stewart magazines and Doris Day movies with a more critical eye. The point being, maybe my expectations were, well, off.

Whether it’s sensible or not, I’m still under a hell of a lot of pressure. My younger self is depending on me to fulfill those hopes, in New York, where people dash dreams about as often as they toast bagels.

I admit on my birthday-day, I let the momentous occasion overwhelm me. It was hard being away from my family and dearest friends, though they all did a magnificent job rallying round, electronically. I went to sleep feeling melancholy. (Or to personalize it– mollycholy.)

But I awoke happy. And it was the first time in months that the day’s starting emotion was joy. I don’t know if it was all the love and attention from the day before, or if my self-pity had worn off, but I felt good. And so far, it’s stuck.

Maybe I’m just getting older.

One of the interesting things about submerging your head under water is the moment between your neck wetting and when you feel the liquid coursing into your ear canal. (I always imagine it like a flash flood — the desert after a rain. A clear blue day and suddenly, with a trickle and then a roar, all the cacti are washed away and the tumbleweeds go all soggy.)

My life is like water in my ears right now. For some reasons which don’t bear going into and some which do, it feels like, as my mother would say, “someone has upsot the apple cart.”  (The apple cart being me.) It’s restlessness and discomfort and exhaustion and exertion.

Nothing’s going my way. Everything’s harder than it should be, takes longer than it ought to. Just this afternoon I went for a walk in the park to cheer myself. I saw a huge leaf pile, and instead of walking around it, I thought it might do me good to skip through it. I hit a rock and twisted my ankle. You see what I mean.

It’s a tough time. But what makes it interesting is that I know I’m in it. I know the water’s about to trickle into my ear. Somehow I got lucky enough to be aware of how much fun I’m not having. And I can’t decide if that makes it more bearable or less.

I know it doesn’t make it any better. Yesterday, I was slouching down 42nd (not to Bethlehem, but Times Square, where there’s no room on the inn), scowling and feeling pretty tough.  That area of New York is always crowded and seems particularly prone to wanderers or little lost citizens who get in the way. I was not in the mood for packs of tourists. I was about a block away from my subway — I could see the glittering yellow circles, smell the grease on the turnstiles — when I slammed into a girl about my age, walking the opposite way. I was knocked a  little off balance and turned to scoff when I saw the crash had made her drop her purse and most of its contents had spilled on the sidewalk. She was frantically trying to scoop them up amid the tangle of feet, more treacherous than jungle vines, and people were starting to complain. Even from my haze of misery, I knew I should help.

I didn’t want to. I wanted to give myself a break. “I’m in my blue period!” I said to myself. “I don’t have the strength to do anything I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t have to pick up some chick’s lipstick that’s in a shade too kitsch to bear anyway.”

And as I walked away, I realized that acknowledgment doesn’t make things better or worse. But it does change who takes credit for things. And I wondered — what if every time you feel the ground shifting beneath, maybe, like in the old disaster movies, it’s just you moving your feet.

During one of the first dizzying months I lived in New York, I sliced my finger opening a bag of frozen peas. The fingertip wasn’t severed, but it was cut to the bone and I haven’t felt anything in it since.

Having been a resident almost a year now, I worry the numbness has spread.

It takes an enormous amount of effort to exist in this city. Just to be. You’re constantly jostled — the subways, the sidewalks, the office corridors. Always making space for someone else and fighting to keep enough room for yourself. I feel I’m always swiveling my hips to let someone pass. I haven’t approached a building square on in weeks.

It’s noise too. Sitting in my apartment, the one place I have the pleasure of no one else’s company, I look out the window and see my neighbors. I hear cars. Voices. Music. I’ve learned that everyone in New York is lonely, no matter how many friends you have. I’m lucky enough to have a huge and loving support system in the city (and I’m not counting the compression stockings my parents insist I wear on airplanes), but sometimes the pace — and the place — is overwhelming.

A good friend (a man who listens about my encounters with other guys,  that kind of good friend) told me that the key to living in New York is to find your church. Not a religious experience, but a ritual for you and you alone. To be done every week. He used to ride the G through Brooklyn to volunteer at a museum. He said this would counter my feelings of isolation.

So many people have tried to explain the loneliness in New York.  I don’t want to go much into the philosophy of this effect in America’s most-populated city. I’ll just tell you how it is for me.

I alternately crave putting my head in or taking my head out of an invisible vice. I waver between the two but neither mental containment nor expansion ever seems like the right thing.  I always feel like I’m posing for a picture.  My heart breaks when I make eye contact with someone I don’t know.

The thing about church is that, ultimately, it’s creating a connection between you and God. It’s a personal, private, solitary thing that can’t be shared with other humans. The definition of lonely. But how can my church — reading a book by the Hudson’s tidal waters in Astoria Park — satisfy me if there’s no deity on the other end of the line?

I guess in that case, it’s just me and the city.

I am the extremely proud owner (renter) of a fire escape.

It is my first.

Having lived in both Chicago and Washington D.C., I consider myself well-versed in roofs and stoops – not to mention porches — but I am only just being introduced to the joys of a chipped black F.E.

I met mine when I moved to Queens as a 23-year-old reporter trying to avoid moving to New York to be a 23-year-old writer.  (The distinction may be wasted on you. Don’t bother trying to puzzle it out.)

Attached to the fire escape is my one-bedroom apartment, all housed in a three-story brick building that smells like Clorox. The clean smell was the single greatest factor in my decision to move in. I later learned the scent was my neighbor’s cologne, but that’s another story.

I first really became acquainted with my fire escape when my patient father, helping me move into the apartment, insisted I install my air conditioning units.

“Open up the window,” he said. I did and even thought to push up the screen. “Now crawl out.”

I peered out the window to the ten-foot drop below.

“No.”

“Crawl out,” my father said, balancing the air conditioner on his thigh.

“Crawl out where?”

“Onto the fire escape.”

“What if it collapses?”

“Now.”

I put the tip of my index finger over the ledge of the window. I touched the rusting metal strips. I measured the two-inch wide gaps against my knuckles.

I leaned back into the room. My father raised his eyebrows.  Eventually he convinced me that a fire escape’s only purpose is to not collapse, so I clambered out and looked around.

My window looks out on a concrete courtyard where old Greek men clean their cars. I could throw a discus to the back windows of my neighbors Across the Way. But in between are several leafy trees. They aren’t the maples I grew up with, but they’re big and knobbly and strong. They are the kind of trees that would look good with a few names carved in them.

My landlord tells me Astoria was put together before the war – I have not asked which – and all its buildings are low-lying. Five-stories is the most you’ll see here, so I have a big view of open sky. After my initial hesitation, my fire escape started to live up to its name. It became my escape. I sit here at night when no one can see me and on Sunday mornings with Martha Stewart’s magazine and some coffee.

Today I am on the metal bars, listening to the downstairs girl practice her saxophone and admiring the way even the city smells good after it rains.  Between the slats, I can see a puddle on the ground below. Three tawny birds are splashing in the water.  Birds need very little water to get clean. Someone should make a commercial about how eco-friendly they are.

There is something relaxing, in a private way, about sitting on a fire escape. It differs from a stoop or a porch. It is the only place to be alone outside in New York.

And mine hasn’t collapsed yet.

Everyone from E.B. White to Carrie Bradshaw has had their crack at capturing the quintessential New York moment. If you stay longer than a few days, you’ll have one. People collect them. Like balls of lint.

I had one just yesterday.

After a brief but broiling summer, autumn has begun its chilly descent on the city  Inch by begrudging inch, young professionals are covering up. There are pomegranates in my grocery store. And even though there are still girls tanning in the parks, you can see they have goosebumps.

I took a walk in Astoria Park, which abuts the tidal waters of the Hudson. I strolled hither and thither and was enjoying some laps on the park’s rubber track when I heard it.  The unmistakable sounds of a small boombox filling a big space. Tinny. Brassy. Loud.

I paused from my grim circling of the track – always feeling like a vulture honing in on my healthier self – and saw three teenagers spreading a tarp. They were wearing identical blue cotton pants and matching shirts – none. One was bald, one had a ringlet rattail, and one had a mohawk. Larry, Curly and Mo writ modern.

They turned up the music and began breakdancing. (There are many distinctions between kinds of breakdancing – popping, locking, b-boys. Unfortunately, they’re all beyond me. Those of you over 25 wouldn’t care anyway.)

I sat on the grass, the first member of their audience. They swiveled on their shoulderblades, twirled on their heads (and toes), kicked their heels up. They practiced freezes (where a dancer suddenly stops moving and holds a difficult position for a few seconds before “spinning out” of it). Mostly they perfected their  tough-guy faces.

Before long, a kid came over.  He was 9, a small black boy named Macauley, and enthralled the way only children lying on their stomachs can be. Soon, there was a pause while the dncers caught their breath and one rubbed his knee after knocking it on the ground. (I said to Macauley, “Even breakdancers need a break.”)

While the older guys drank Gatorade, Macauley sidled up to the tarp. He looked at the teenage men, all of whom ignored him. Then he put his toe on the mat. He twirled around once. Twice. Then he began his own freestyle dance. He did flips, kip ups, freezes. He popped his lock and then broke back into the damn building. Before long, the older guys were propping him up and clapping for him and generally being perfect candidates for a commercial on mentoring.

I felt it was a beautiful New York moment. It was so urban. Three teenagers playing street music in a park. Suddenly, a little kid wants to participate. And instead of snubbing him or ignoring him, they include him. I felt I might be witnessing the beginning of Macauley’s future. The yellow fall light and breeze from the water made everything feel cinematic. I left the park smiling.

I recounted the tale to a friend later, explaining it in detail and how special it felt and trying to do justice to the humanity of it all.

“A New York moment, huh?” he said.  “And they didn’t ask you for money?”