Watching: All sorts of stuff that I would never see if it weren't for the wonder of TiVo. It is my master. I come home every day excited about what it has in store for me. I watched "Double Indemnity" on last Sunday morning, which is one of my favorite movies because it contains every cheesy element of terrific film noir, and I never would have actually gone to the trouble of taping it at 4:00 a.m. on AMC. And I love that it will record the premiere of "Keen Eddie" on Bravo even though I no longer have any recollection of when it is going to be on. So it's wonderful. Even though you find yourself up at 1:30 in the morning on a Wednesday night watching Celebrity Mole for the second time to see if you can find any clues. (I think it's Rudy from The Cosby Show, by the way.) Reading: A million things. One of which is The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. It's a history of the English language. I loved A Short History so much, so one of my goals this year is to basically read everything else he's written. Also, earlier this month, I finished a little chicklit book called The Perfect Elizabeth. Not only was there the title, of course, but it began on the narrator's 32nd birthday. Buying: More Philosophy. Seriously, I have never noticed any kind of difference in my skin from any other system I've used before, but this stuff has done wonders for me. Listening: Tom Jones's Reloaded, his greatest hits collection. I'm sort of grooving on Tom Jones these days. There's a song called "Delilah" which freaked me out because he kills Delilah, in the song, he kills her. I had probably played the song about ten times before I actually listened to the words. According to my parents, though, it was a huge hit for him back in the day. And "Sexbomb" is quite the fun song, though that is a little freaky because Tom Jones is like a hundred years old, and I'm not.

Not counting my uncle, and my parents' neighbors who are all rich white guys in their sixties, the reactions to my Howard Dean bumper sticker have been three to a half on the plus side.

About two months ago, I was cleaning out my car by the dumpsters in the maintenance yard of my subdivision, and a woman drove by and said, "Hey, I like your bumper sticker!" I actually had another one in my car so I gave it to her.

Then on New Year's Eve, I was driving down Route 7 on my way home from DSW (where I bought nothing, by the way, despite carrying two coupons totalling $15 that expired that day), and someone behind me honked, and I was confused as we were just driving along, nothing honk-worthy happening. Then the car pulled up alongside me and the driver was waving emphatically, and I was still confused as I didn't recognize him. Then he finally pulled ahead of me and I saw the Dean bumper sticker on his car, and it all made sense. I enjoyed the solidarity of the moment.

And last week, after rehearsal, another woman in the cast asked me about it as we were leaving. She told me she was a Democrat but she hadn't decided who to support, and wanted to know why I chose Dean over everyone else. So we had a short conversation but it was approximately ten degrees and we decided it would be better continued at another time. Plus another woman came over and said she was a Republican and started in on Hillary Clinton, which just annoyed me, because if you can't find anything more topical to talk about than why Hillary Clinton stayed with Bill, then you just shouldn't be talking. I mean, I am definitely open to intelligent debate, but come on.

The negative half-point comes from someone who yelled something at me as I was taking groceries out of my car the other night. I have no idea what he said, but since he didn't slow down long enough for me to hear him, I'm assuming it was something less than complimentary, and that's really the only thing it could have been about.

Unless he was freaked out at the Gloomy Bear. My little blue Gloomy is hanging in the driver side window of the backseat, glaring out at bad drivers with his little bloody claws and his drippy bloody mouth. He gets a lot of puzzled looks by the people who give me my food at drive-through windows.

I have been doing a lot of thinking. Big time thinking. It feels good. I haven't done a lot of thinking in a long time, just plain old big-picture, meaning-of-life thinking.

The thing is, I am over Christianity, indefinitely. I was in a church the Monday before Thanksgiving for my aunt's funeral, but other than that, I haven't set foot in one in probably three years. There's so much about it that doesn't make sense to me anymore, setting aside the politics of organized religion, which is enough to make anyone think twice.

I'm certainly not an atheist, and I can't see myself ever reaching that level of cynicism, which is what I ascribe most atheism to, in a very generalized way, of course. I suppose I could classify myself as agnostic, though that doesn't seem quite right either.

However, I have come to realize that I'm not happy just going through my life with no spiritual direction at all. I need some information, I need to learn, I need to think, to reason, to contemplate.

So I was wandering around the bookstore the other day, a gift card burning a hole in my wallet. I walked by the Self-Help shelves and - speaking of cynicism - all I could think was what a load of crap it all was. There's Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura and Dr. Whatthefuck, all claiming to have the answer to my problems. It just seemed utterly ridiculous. And believe me, I have bought more than one of those books in my day, books I was sure would change my life forever. Feng shui, codependency, ten stupid things women do to mess up their lives. Whatever.

So I moved on. I wandered past the New Age section, which, if it weren't so covered with stars and beams of light, might have something interesting to say.

Mostly because I was trying to eavesdrop on a conversation between two women standing in front of the "Wicca for Dummies" section, I wound up in front of the Philosophy shelves. I was still there long after the two women had left.

I think this is what I was looking for. I know nothing of philosophy, other than Socrates taught Plato and Plato taught Aristotle. I remember a college ethics class where we learned about Kant and his categorical imperatives, and Locke and his tabula rasa, and Descartes and his "je crois que je suis" (I think, therefore I am) and that is really all I remember about any of it, that right there. And I'm absolutely ignorant of any of the 20th century philosophers. I can tell you nothing of Marx, of Nietzsche, of Kierkegaard. Not one damn thing, and that's kind of pathetic.

I started looking for something that held itself out as a general introduction. (I couldn't bring myself to pick up "The Idiot's Guide to Philosophy." I just... couldn't.) Eventually I found a slim volume called The Consoloations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton. Right there on the cover was a Newsweek quote: "A fine introduction to the world of philosophy."

So I bought it. And it's been fascinating me ever since. If TiVo weren't depriving me of sleep already, this book would do it.

De Botton basically takes six problems (unpopularity, not having enough money, frustration, inadequacy, a broken heart, and difficulties) and matches them up with six philosophers (Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, respectively) to explain how their views of existence can offer solutions to the modern you and me.

The way it's written is fascinating in and of itself. The philosophies are explained very easily, in short, simple chapters. He interweaves biographies of the philosophers themselves, and descriptions of the societies they came from. It helps you understand why Socrates's method of questioning everything was such a big deal in ancient Athens (indeed why he was put to death for it), when asking why things were the way they were would have seemed "as obtuse as asking why spring followed winter or why ice was cold."

As a result, I find light bulbs going off all over the place. Seneca, for example, recognized frustration as the result of a wish colliding with an unyielding reality. We get frustrated when we are stuck in traffic for no other reason than because we believe that we should be able to get where we're going without delay. Yet we know that traffic jams happen all the time, and we don't get angry on anyone else's behalf when they complain about getting stuck. It's getting over the rather self-important concept that we are, for some reason, entitled to a lack of traffic jams (even when others around us are not) that will help put an end to our sense of frustration.

I like thinking about that.

Times Square, New York City. I haven't been in a while. I miss it.