Leeza is Bored.

---

Good Morning!

Good morning America! I am going to fill your morning with some inane drivel!

I told you I got sick the other night. I assumed it was from food, but now I am strongly suspicious that the water I drank out of a cup the other night was actually water from the tap, and not cooler water like I reassured myself that it was.

• lesson: the tap water really does give you diarrhea •

Believe it or not, I've survived this before (in Dubai, for instance) and although the antibiotics certainly shorten the acute part of the illness, you are still left feeling like crap for the next two or three days. Consequently, I spent my holiday weekend lying around the house drinking fruit juice and electrolyte packets and trying to eat rice. And today I'm really bored.

I could go to the park or a store--theoretically. But then I have to put up with me being a 170-cm black-and-white-haired Caucasian girl with a big nose in small-town China, and all that implies. There is no anonymity. Sometimes, there isn't even any respect (a group of 20-somethings were--I kid you not--making monkey noises at me the other day). And of course, there is the language barrier. I can't speak a word of Mandarin, which truly embarrasses and shames me. It also makes walking around town pretty much useless except to get from point A to point B.

So I haven't had any human contact since Friday night and I guess that's why I'm gabbing at you for no reason today.

On the positive side of life, I did in fact learn how to make quotations as if this blog were a newspaper article...! I am going to have fun with this.

n the positive side of life, I did in fact learn how to make quotations...

One funny (as in absurd) thing about my life is that I haven't figured out yet how to get rid of my garbage, so there is approximately one month's worth of detritus sitting around in grocery bags throughout my apartment. Maybe I'm not supposed to generate garbage? I really have no way of finding out by asking my neighbors...

And speaking of asking...can anyone stateside tell me about the Oil Spill? I only intercept whatever is featured in Yahoo News...and from the comments of the readers, it would seem that the Oil Spill isn't being adequately covered in the American Mainstream Media and such. Just like those freak storms in California, and that one time in Cincinnati when Hurricane Ike destroyed our electric infrastructure for well over a week. Nobody heard about these things. And thus I must ask the legendary American free press: What's going on (t)here?

---

Comments

[Susan]

I get my oil spill news from yahoo. There may have been something on the news, but I haven't seen it. Without you in town, my watching of the news goes way down.

[Alan]

Water
Leeza, So your two issues are with contaminated water - at the micro and macro scales. One, you drank a glass of bad H2O and the other is all of the Gulf sea water going bad from the oil spill. Hopefully this note finds you fully recovered and back to eating squids on a stick. Although today, I admit, I ate at Subway. a 6" BMT. in a mall. in Beijing...it's just not right. The other is that as an official news junkie, I see absolutely no pushing the oil spill story to the backburner by the media. It's all over CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, Reuters, CBS, ABC and China Daily. And yes, I read both MSNBCommunist and FoxReactionaryRightWingPropogandaNews. Then I go to the AP site. Truth is in their somewhere, just gotta go look for it. Oil spill is also generating all sorts of lunatic conspiracy theories: it's the work of Al-Queda, Taliban, Cheney's Goons, Obama's goons, tea-party, out of work welders (yes, really!), Iran, and I'm pretty sure soon they will include Elvis. Sometimes an industrial accident is just an accident. Argh... They announced today that they are constructing a large containment structure to sit over the broken pipe to capture the oil and then pump it up to a waiting super tanker until they can drill a relief well and then plug the current well. That could take 6 - 8 days for the largest leak. Relief well could take 3 months. I sure hope this containment chamber idea works!

[Global Drifter]

Whew
Glad the issue is getting the coverage it deserves. From what I read online, it's a major disaster. It looks like the Yahoo commenters were wrong, as usual. Myself, I am 90% better, but from past experience, it really takes about a week to get back to 100%. I AM NOW TERRIFIED OF WATER.