I was inspired by last week’s New Yorker, the one with “Red Death on Wall Street” on the cover, no schadenfraude intended. Despite the nightmares in which I’m greeted by the Grim Reaper in Dennis Rodman hip-hop garb and I cry tears of blood, the Malcolm Gladwell article, “Late Bloomers,” gave me a bit of artistic hope.

It opens with an anecdote (warning: article spoiler) about this guy who quits his job as a lawyer with the dream we all know too well of being A Writer. He has little literary training, but is disciplined. He sells a few stories, and is obviously intelligent, having passed the bar and all. At this point in my reading, I start shaking my head and muttering obscenities. I’m having flashbacks to the Murakami article several months ago (culled from his new running memoir) in which he describes quitting his bar-owning lifestyle to become a best-selling prolific novelist because it “suited” him. I’m not sure if I’m revising Murakami here, but I basically understood his career path as an I-decided-to-be-a-writer-and-so-it-happened tale.

So, this lawyer sells some stories, then there’s a dark period, an unpublished novel, then something in Harper’s, a short story collection, then lots of awards. I’m envious and bitter and pretty sure I’m on the local bus to nowheresville, when Gladwell tells us the catch: the timeline. This lawyer guy’s rise took 18 years. Immediately, I felt buoyant.

The article explores our natural inclination to associate genuis with precocity, using examples like Ben Fountain (the lawyer and late bloomer) and Jonathon Saffron Foer (the precocious genius), as well as Picasso and Cezanne. It debunks some myths and introduces the concept of the “patron,” the person or people who fund the artist on the long walk to glory. I began to find that it helps me deal with my job if I consider my company my patron rather than my employer.

This is one of my favorite quotes: ”On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.”

I like the quote and the article because they give me the illusion of hope, offering a nod to the blind faith that is the antithesis to my logical constitution. It is one of last lines in the article that left me the most encouraged, “sometimes genuis is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.”

I have more rejections coming my way. More setbacks. More thoughts of failure. More crappy patrons. More ass sores from sitting in that damn desk chair. But someday, I tell you, some day…

I am horrified. Sorta rageful. Cringing fitfully. But I get it. I understand why Curve Magazine had to refer to me as a “woman,” at least once. The use of “girl” seems excessive and sloppy. (Is it a “woman’s journey” or a “girl’s bike trip”? Consistency copyeditors.) However, there is one phrase, the title of my article as listed in the table of contents, that makes my gender identity flare his nostrils in anger:

Cycling Sista

I always swore that I would never be one of those trans people to nitpick about pronouns, make a stink about bathrooms, be militant, bother every friend and lover with constant talk of my body “dysphoria,” or use “dysphoria” or “gender identity” without laughing. But that’s before I actually accepted that I am a trans person, an invisible guy, one who at least is still laughing at the title of his blog post.

Curve is a lesbian magazine. It says the word three times on the cover, including, “Best-Selling Lesbian Magazine.” The audience is Women and Womyn. In flyover states. If I had a quarter for every time a writing teacher told me you don’t have to be the audience of a magazine to write for the magazine; just know your audience…

Five months ago, during my unemployed stint, Curve posted a Craigslist ad seeking freelance writers. Since it’s hard to pitch travel magazines unsolicited, I pitched two travel stories to Curve, one about a permaculture farm in Costa Rica, the other about bicycle touring. I was fully aware that I was trying to sneak destination and adventure travel stories into the mag, so hidden in over 2,000 total words, I included less than 50 words about dyke soccer and a gay bar. (It was really a gay men’s bar.) I also used the following phrases in my pitch, “For the adventurous lesbian,” and “After reading my article, lesbians will know.” In my daily life, I NEVER use the word lesbian, because even my lesbian friends think the word sounds like a disease, but I looked at the cover of the magazine and tried to know my audience. I was complicit in this whole debacle.

But… Is there something about being a woman, or a girl, or a sista that is intrinsic to my story? NO! Is it necessary that a woman reading the story assumes that the first-person guide is a woman in order to identify with her? Yes and no. The exact same story (minus the 50 words with the two “dyke” mentions) could’ve been in a men’s magazine, but perhaps it would’ve been less inspiring to the readers of Curve. We seek connections with others like ourselves.

Which is why, even though I don’t think there is an appropriate angle for me to write a letter to Curve expressing my frustration, I am frustrated. I do not feel connected to women. At all. I might as well come out with it: I am NOT a woman.

My boy name is “Nick.” I don’t use it very often, and for now, at least, I don’t mind having two names. If you are one of my friends pulling for “Nino,” I suggest you start calling me that ASAP, because although I like how close it is to my name, it could take a while to get used to. So, I wonder, if I had submitted my article with the name “Nick” or “Nino,” would the editor have asked if I was a woman, would she have just as easily called me out as a woman in the table of contents and title, would she have assumed that in pitching Curve, I was one of the many dykes with a masculine name? Would it have been inappropriate for a man to write the article, a transman? What about a genderqueer boi?

When I walk down the streets, I access my superhuman power to jump into bodies of the dudes. I see myself in time-lapse metamorphosis, my breasts vanishing into pecks, my dick pressing out of my pelvic area. Then, I look in the mirror and see the flatness of my chest, feel the binder ripping into my armpits. I run my hands across my checks, soft as a pre-pubescent boy.

The word “woman” is nails on a chalkboard, a rude interruption of my reality. I am done with my silence, done passing. But even as I write this, I pass. “How’s it going, sister?” asks the plant guy in my office. I have known him for almost ten years. I see him only once a year, usually a run-in at one of my various office jobs. He is twenty feet away watering; I am at my cube; I want to shout, “Hey! Don’t call me sister.” I stay quiet.

If I end up transitioning, or partially transitioning, or changing my name, and someone asks me how I could be so sure, I will say that Curve Magazine helped. That I saw the words “woman” and “girl” and “sista” in print, applied to me, and that I simultaneously wanted to cry, die, disappear and breath fire.

I like my reality better than your reality. And I will chose mine over yours. But fuck you for making me choose.

There was a picture of a hot girl with tattoos on the cover of the NY Times magazine yesterday, and it messed with my whole morning. It’s a good rule of thumb never to start the paper by reading the magazine, especially the cover story. The Sunday magazine is best kept until the week, for public transportation or the gym, the only part of the paper that can be saved and not hang over your head like homework. But read the magazine first, and already a half an hour of precious Sunday morning time has passed, and you’re still stuck there with a stack of unread newspaper.

But with the girl and headline, “Blog-Post Confidential: What I gained–and lost–by revealing my intimate life on the web,” I dug right in. I was hoping to find answers to why people, including me, blog about personal issues, and maybe to find the line that separates sharing from oversharing. Also, I was curious about a first person essay as the cover story. I still can’t believe so much space is given to a topic that seems more fitting to the Style section and a Modern Love column.

So anyways, the author Emily made her entrance into the online world with a personal blog called Emily Magazine. She still writes on it, and it is apparent that her Times piece drove traffic and two hundred plus comments to her recent post, “Room-elephant acknowledged.” Her personal blog appears no different from other personal blogs, like mine, except that she seems to have more friends than me, counting about 200 visitors. I have so few visitors, I know them all by name and don’t bother with numbers.

Emily writes that she always desired to broadcast herself, tell others the ongoing story of her life. She says blogging is like a drug, but then excuses her use of the universal metaphor by saying it’s so exact, “maybe it’s not a metaphor at all.” She creates a larger context for the culture of personal blogging by tying it to a time when reality TV rules the airwaves.

The essay is a good read for the voyeuristic, but only an okay read in terms of her insights. To stick with her drug metaphor that is too true to be a metaphor, she should probably just go to blogging rehab, share in group therapy that “The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion.”

Basically, Emily had a personal blog, then a job at Gawker, blogging about “Manhattan media gossip.” She becomes somewhat of a virtual celebrity, equally praised and pissed upon, in the same way that Sex and the City’s Carrie would be, had she blogged for a major New York website. The commenting, not to mention the high-stress life of a blogger (see recent Times article, In the Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop), as well as the working from home leads to depression.

The question of how personal to be on her Gawker blog (the more personal, the greater the readership it seems) resulted in more personal posts. Then there was a break-up, sex with a co-worker, pseudonyms, a new personal anonymous blog “Heartbreak Soup” that didn’t stay anonymous, password protections, a pay-back, an embarrassing experience with Jimmy Kimmel on TV, and what Emily seems to understand now, as a whole lot of oversharing. She is left with the realization that the only way to eliminate it all is to “destroy the entire Internet.”

But she can’t, so she keeps all her posts up, “as a sort of memorial to a time in my life when I thought my discoveries about myself and what I loved were special enough to merit sharing with the world immediately.” In the end, by writing the Times piece, she is revealing even more about what happened. And to that, she responds, “Well, I’m an oversharer.”

I’m still not positive what I walked away learning, or thinking more about after reading this story of a blogger’s life unraveling. (I particularly like the one sentence she slipped in about the major changes leading to the upswing in her life, including, “I quit smoking pot cold turkey.” Clearly, nobody told her that pot leads to oversharing on a grand scale.)

Yes, the Interwebs is a dangerous place, but I already knew this. We all have it in us to be Google-stalkers. Recently, I’ve heard quite a few confessions regarding the post-breakup online stalking, which basically ranges from checking MySpace and Facebook pages of exes to communities where they post messages to searching Craigslist personals for terms that will lead to the ex’s ad. This is self-torture, but it is surprisingly common.

As someone with the genetics, or maybe it’s the compulsion to share the ongoing story of my life, I relate very much to those who cannot help but start blogs and continue to unburden themselves while lying in unmade beds. To all the of the people who feel a twinge of nervousness as the mouse arrow rests on the “Publish” button, to all of us out there with the blogging disease, I say, Let us overshare. Let us overshare with restraint.

If you find the June issue of Town and Country magazine in your local bookstore and open it, you will find many diamond and perfume advertisements. You will also find, on p. 134, what isn’t quite an article, but an item, written by me. It’s a brief, concise, succinct piece on an organization that leads bicycling and walking tours (luxury vacation style). The participants also raise money for AIDS and breast cancer charities. Check out the link, and see what it looks like when an editor edits my writing. Or better yet, buy the magazine. I did.

I recently became obsessed with Details magazine. As a teenager and young adult, I never looked at it, knowing that the women’s counterparts, like Vogue and Cosmo, were meant for me. I ignored those as well and lived my life in jeans and t-shirts, bereft of style and clueless to fashion. When I started to identify as more of a man than a woman, I was able to find at least a small portion of mass-market media that appealed to me, most of it targeted to males. And, to my shock, Details is not a trashy, low-brow, guilty pleasure; it’s actually a good magazine.

The covers of Details rule (Zac Efron pictured here). There is always a ridiculously attractive man piercing you with a glare, his eyes coy, solemn, and earnest. A Rod Steward song picks up in my head: If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, sugar, buy this magazine.

Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (as well as the books, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys), writes a monthly column. Augusten Burroughs writes a monthly column. Unlike other mainstream mags, Details acknowledges and includes its gay audience (Gay or Straight?), which I think of as a no-brainer, considering the cover and the contents.

Details also acts as an instructional manual on men’s fashion. Sadly, due my ill-fitting female body, articles about choosing the right suit or vest don’t work for me, as I’m often relegated to any suit or vest that fits. But those on choosing a cologne or working with neckware–scarves, bow ties, and ties–help immensely. Everyone has secrets, great embarrassing shames, like being unable to read or drive a stick shift. Mine (other than the stick shift one), is that I cannot tie a tie. A few weeks ago, on the BART platform, a comedy performer in costume asked  if anyone could tie her tie for her. She turned directly to me and said, “I’m sure you can.” I looked down at my running shoes and nodded my head no. I watched on as someone else did it, deflated and feeling sorry for myself and my pathetic masculinity. But perusing Details’ online content, I came across this godsend of a video, amongst many others. If this is too simple for you, check out the bow tie instructional.

Gay or Straight? Gay, for sure.

Unable to stop procrastinating, I came across the following Details video, a Craigslist personal ad turned into a music video. Seriously. The lyrics are taken from a real post. This is for everyone who has lost days of their lives obsessed with finding the most bizarre Craigslist personals.