Like a Liz Phair song, the rhythm of Gwen's entries mix a sing-song playfulness with her interests, giving them a funny, compulsive quality. In one entry, she'll begin by gently asking your permission to tell you about that sad thing from a few years ago that still haunts her, and in another, she'll bluntly tell you she had a dream where she gave John Ritter a hand job, or how cool it would be to return an author his own book, with the cheesy parts stamped with the word CHEESE, or the funny sipping and exhaling sounds her husband makes when he drinks his coffee. Things and ideas just become her playground.

Mike: The environments in which you have been raised and live have been testosterone-heavy: raised with all brothers, and now a married mom with all boys. Do you have any insight about gender that most people are unaware of, and how do you think these environments affect you as a distinct person?

Gwen: I believe that most non-physical differences between the sexes are a result of nurture and not nature. I also believe that the traits that make a good man are the same as the ones that make a good woman. However, I probably don't know anything that most people aren't aware of. Women and men now go to school together and work together, so it's only a very sheltered person  in America, at least  who doesn't realize these things.

I'm suspicious of people who try to enforce gender stereotypes. I'll defend anyone's right to wear pink every day, but people who try to coerce or convince me to "be ladylike" are alien to me. I can't even understand their motives.

I used to feel uncomfortable around very feminine women, but now I'm pretty much over that. Even though men are physically stronger, I don't fear them in the same way that I've feared women.

I've been trained, however inadvertantly, to judge and get off on photographs of scantily-clad women. That's another phenomenon that occurs nationwide, though. It may be more pronounced in my case, but most women are taught to view each other as art or fantasy fodder these days, I think. At least, they are in America.

Mike: I once spent six weeks outside San Antonio, Texas. In the dewy winter mornings I would see these things that looked like slugs the size of Irish setters. I was told they were jack rabbits, and they made me want to vomit. Texas also has really big cockroaches. You live in Texas. Have you seen these things? What kind of evolutionary hothouse are you people running down there?

Gwen: They made you want to vomit? You silly.

I don't see a lot of jack rabbits, but I had a lot of experience with vomit-inducing cockroaches in Houston. Not only did we have the huge tree roaches  we had the huge FLYING tree roaches. They always flew into my hair. It made me cry. We also had huge, flying, two-headed tree roaches. I never examined those very closely, though. I think it was the humidity that bred such things.

Where I live now, in "the Texas Hill Country", there aren't as many roaches, but there are super-gigantic mutant grasshoppers and/or locusts. Those get so big... they're way scarier than the roaches. Once I destroyed an ornamental shrub in our own yard by wrecking my car into it. See, there was a huge locust-hopper on my window. I couldn't open the car door because the monster bug would have been able to touch me. So