Mossy Cottage Knits

Why I Love the Internets

A few weeks ago, my lips and the skin around my mouth started to taste bitter. (Maybe other parts of my skin, too, but I declined to indulge in random licking.) The bitterness wouldn’t go away, either, the way sweet or salty does after a meal. I’d lick my lips, taste the bitter, and if I licked them half an hour or two hours or even a day later, they’d still be just as bitter, maybe even more so.

The bitterness concerned me because I’ve had to tweak some of my meds lately and I thought it might be a side effect, one that was seeping up from the inside out. I’ve taken epilepsy medications before that made all food taste like rotten meat (even sugared sodas, which was beyond gross) or tin foil, so this line of thinking wasn’t too farfetched to my mind. I even toyed with the idea that the bitterness was psychological, emphasis on the "psycho."

I let the issue go for a few days but eventually it bothered me enough that I decided to Google “skin tastes bitter,” keeping my expectations low because the whole thing felt weird and unique and I was sure I had stumbled across the one thing the Internet wouldn’t have the answer to. But there it was, two or three hits down the page, the question, “Have you used a can of pressurized air to clean your keyboard lately?,” followed by the answer to the mystery: “Manufacturers have added a bitter taste to cans of pressurized air to combat huffing.”

Yes, by Jove, I had just used a can of pressurized air to clean my work keyboard. And since I (a) type a lot (it’s me job) and (b) am an inveterate face-toucher, I had developed what seemed to be permanently bitter skin. One good scrub of the face and problem solved. Until I typed again and touched my face again 30 seconds later.

Still, I loves me the Internet.