I've been feeling better over the last week or so than I had been... partly, I think, due to my near-rabid consumption of books, music, and to a surprisingly lesser extent, TV. I can't afford to do much shopping or other things that would literally get me out of the house, so I've been trying hard to find more reasonable methods of escape.

I haven't been completely confined to the house - on Tuesday, I met with MB, a woman from my writer's club, at Barnes & Noble to hang out. We had drinks and snacks from the Starbucks cafe inside (BTW, iced chai + rice krispy treat = sugar coma) and then just looked at books and talked for hours. Good times.

Both of us actually managed to not buy anything, despite being book addicts - but in my case, only because I bought a book the day before: Charlaine Harris' "Dead Until Dark," the first novel in her series about Sookie Stackhouse. With "True Blood" gone until next summer (the season finale was OMG!), I need my Bill Compton fix. Hee hee.

I haven't started reading it yet - I have three books from the library that are due a week from Monday. I'm not quite done with the first one I'm tackling: "Dracula," aka the one horror novel I never thought I'd read because I used to really dislike vampires. Anyway, it's very good, but slow going for me - it takes my entire brain to comprehend the old-fashioned English. Kinda like watching "Deadwood," with much less profanity.

The Killers' latest album came out this week, and I love a few of the songs on it ("Losing Touch" and "Spaceman" especially) but I don't love the entire album - yet. The only album of theirs that I loved instantly was "Sam's Town," but the others took time to grow on me. I keep reading reviews comparing "Day & Age" to the Pet Shop Boys, which I can kinda hear. Actually, I'd say it's like a movie soundtrack collaborated on by the Pet Shop Boys, Duran Duran and Talking Heads. But then, I'd keep buying Killers albums if all they contained was Brandon Flowers burping the alphabet. My tattoo kinda obligates me to that. Which reminds me of an amusing conversation I had with my cousin on Thanksgiving:

Him: "Oh, I like The Killers too."
Me: (shows him my tattoo)
Him: "... I don't like them that much."

And yesterday, I finally found a way to look through Amazon's entire list of free MP3 downloads. Score!

I meant to telebinge on all the episodes of "Dexter" I've missed so far this season - all of them, except the season premiere - but it turned out I wasn't quite ready to take on eight hours of America's favorite serial killer all at once. I got through two episodes, and even though Jimmy Smits as a sociopathic politician (is that a redundancy?) is kinda hot, I'm not finding any of storylines very compelling. I would have preferred the series to follow the novels more closely - but only if they left out "Dearly Devoted Dexter," which is so scary that I will never read it again. No kidding.

Also: Though the last thing I need is another TV show to catch up with, I watched the first episode of "Capadocia" OnDemand. Presumably shown on HBO Latino, it's a cross between "Oz" and "Epitafios." In other words: Awesome and terrifying. I don't know why I love prison dramas so...