Reading: The previously-discussed The Consolations of Philosophy and The Mother Tongue. Also, More Than You Know, by Beth Gutcheon. Very interesting so far. The chapters alternate between the present, which is an old woman narrating a ghost story from her childhood, and the time sixty years before the childhood period, where we meet the character who becomes the ghost. It's quite good. So yes, I am reading three books at once. I do that a lot. They're each feeding different parts of my brain. Not Reading: Piles of magazines. I swear I need a day just to read magazines. I have at least two issues of Real Simple, Oprah, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair, and the Washingtonian piled up next to my bed, and they all have articles I actually want to read. I blame TiVo and the fact that I don't ride the Metro anymore. Watching: Oh, way too much. TiVo has world domination plans, I'm telling you. I don't usually get home much before 11:00 these days, and as tired as I am, I can't go to bed until I switch on the TV and see what it's got for me.

Alas, we are alighting upon Oscar season! Nominations are out Tuesday, which will, of course, bring the return of my infamous Oscar pool.

I fear, however, that I will have seen none of the movies that end up being nominated for Best Picture. I have not seen Return of the King. (And probably won't. I'm sorry, everyone, I really am, no one enjoys a good bandwagon more than me, but I just couldn't get into it. I tried. Please don't hate me.) I have not seen Cold Mountain, Mystic River, or Lost in Translation either.

In fact, I really haven't seen anything at all this year. Of the 270-odd films eligible for Oscars this year, I have seen exactly ten: Bend It Like Beckham, Dirty Pretty Things, Finding Nemo, Girl with the Pearl Earring, The Italian Job, Love Actually, Mona Lisa Smile, Owning Mahowney, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Seabiscuit.

That's pretty sad.

However, I'm still excited about them. I'm excited about the pool, of course, and I decided that I'm going to have an Oscar party as well. (I may even have nominated-movie-themed food, though I don't know yet how that will work. A cold mountain of cheese? A mystic river of salsa?) I haven't had any kind of an organized gathering since I moved here, so it's probably about time. And it will force me to clean my house, which is a good thing because the following weekend is the opening of the play, and I'll have guests here every weekend we perform, so I really need to get the place organized.

Speaking of the play, it's going pretty well overall. I'm having a little bit of a hard time settling into my character. There's nothing in the script that has anything to do with her personal life, so I kind of have to make it all up, and sometimes the sense I get of who she is doesn't necessarily jibe with the script. But I'm confident I'll figure her out pretty soon.

The rest of the cast is very cool, not a goober in the bunch. Three of the main characters -- Holmes, Watson, and Lady Agatha -- are actually British, which is great, as they teach the rest of us how to say things. I have little crushes on Sir Henry, who is perhaps 25 and reminds me endlessly of Adam Ant in his pre-insanity days, and on Watson, who is perhaps 60. (It's the accent.)

Actually, Watson and I have a bit of work to do. We close the second scene on an incredibly cheesy exchange. Perkins is telling him what a villager saw on the moor, this horrible flame-breathing red-eye-glowing hound. She asks Watson if he believes the local about what he saw. To her surprise, he says yes, because he saw it too. Perkins says: "The hound of the Baskervilles?" and Watson replies: "No, Perkins - a hound of hell!"

The problem is, I cannot get through this exchange without bursting out laughing. Thankfully, the curtain drops right after he says it, so I just have to hold my supposedly shocked expression for a second or two before I lose it. In an ideal world, I wouldn't laugh at all, and maybe by the time we're ready to open, I'll be over it. The fact is that every scene ends on a similarly melodramatic note, but this is the only one that I'm so directly involved in.

I have some things to say about the State of the Union address. The upshot is that it made me sad, and angry, and more determined than ever to get this man out of office.

What made me sad was the complete lack of any kind of acknowledgement that any Democrat anywhere ever had a good idea. I went back and reviewed some of Clinton's State of the Union addresses, and I was surprised at how often he stressed the need for both sides of the aisle to work together. In fact, Clinton was constantly being accused by Republicans of co-opting their ideas, and I never understood why this was a problem for them. If George Bush ever "stole" a bit of Democratic policy and ran with it, I'd be thrilled.

But he won't. He stood up there and chastized everyone who disagreed with him about the war in Iraq, about the Patriot Act, about privatizing Social Security. It was the presidential equivalent of "my way or the highway" and the closed-mindedness of it all made me sad.

A number of things made me angry, truthfully, not the least of which was that not a single word of that speech had anything to do with me, an average, middle-class American citizen trying to find permanent employment and access to health care. I heard all about Iraqis, I heard all about immigrants, I heard all about old people. I heard nothing about me.

But the part of the speech that made me the angriest, that literally made me scream at the television, was this little nugget:

Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.

I was horrified by this. Horrified that the leader of our country casually throws around phrases like "activist judges" and "arbitrary will," horrified that he could even hint at a Constitutional amendment preventing 10% of our population from creating a legal manifestation of their love for another.

And I was struck by how this excerpt could have been lifted word-for-word from a State of the Union given 40 years ago.

In 1958, a white man named Richard Loving and a black woman named Mildred Jeter decided to get married, each with the full support of their families. They were both native Virginians, but were not allowed to get married there, so they traveled 150 miles to Washington DC, got married, and returned to their home. One month later, they woke up at 2:00 in the morning to find two policemen standing in their bedroom. They were arrested and convicted of violating Virginia's statute against interracial marriage, and sentenced to one year in jail, which was suspended for 25 years, provided they leave the state and not return for at least that amount of time. In his opinion, the trial judge said:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix...

The Lovings agreed to the deal and moved to Washington. A year later they returned to Virginia to visit their families and were arrested again. They were released and told that they could only return to the state if they traveled separately. Eventually they started a family and decided they wanted to return home to raise their children, so they pursued their case up the judicial ladder.

Finally, in 1967, a bunch of activist judges known as the Supreme Court forced their arbitrary will on the United States people by holding that it was unconstitutional to make interracial marriage illegal.

This also flew in the face of "the people's voice," by the way. The year after Loving vs. Virginia was decided, 75% of the country still opposed interracial marriage. According to Bush's logic, if he were president in 1968, he'd be using the exact same language he used last week to propose a Constitutional amendment banning it.

Sometimes "the people" are just plain wrong.

If you are against gay marriage, I respect your opinion. I do. But I challenge you to give me one valid argument against it that isn't grounded in religion, which is not supposed to be a factor in deciding what laws to pass. If gays shouldn't be allowed to get married because it goes against your idea of God, then you should be opposed to atheists marrying as well. If gays shouldn't get married because they can't produce children, then people who choose not to have children or people who are biologically unable to reproduce shouldn't be allowed to marry either.

This "sanctity of marriage" argument baffles me. The President and others throw it around as a reason to be against gay marriage but no one can actually explain why it is relevant to this debate. As far as I'm concerned, any sanctity in a marriage is made or broken by the two people in it and no one else. Where is all the evidence that straight people have a lock on the sanctity of marriage? Britney Spears was married for three days. Battered women's shelters are overflowing. 50% of marriages end in divorce. Just where the hell is this sanctity Bush is so determined to protect?

Above all, I'm insulted, as a lawyer and as an American, that my President can even suggest that a Constitutional amendment is the answer here. Amendments do not prevent one segment of the population from enjoying rights and privileges enjoyed by others. Aside from restrictions with regard to age, not one single amendment bans one citizen from doing something another citizen is free to do. Constitutional amendments prevent the government from infringing on people's rights. They don't do the infringing.

I saw more than one Republican Congressperson go on TV and agree that it's never going to happen, that Bush didn't really mean it, and really, that doesn't make me feel any better. I think it's grossly irresponsible to use the podium at the State of the Union to cavalierly invoke the Constitutional process without even having the nerve to say exactly what you're invoking it for.

And I'm planning to do all I can to make sure that this was the last time George W. Bush will have that opportunity.

Bring it on.