this is WHAT?!

on the bus ride home from madura, i don't know if we hit a bump or what, but i somehow managed to bite my lower lip pretty good. it bled and then turned into a canker sore that hurts. and i keep catching my front teeth on it, making it bleed and get even more irritated. it's obnoxious.

yesterday, i woozed over to kim's house to find some "gentle food". i wasn't feeling good and ibu had made spicy for dinner last night. kim had just made some baked potatoes, so i ate one of those. hurrah for moms away from mom! i asked her if she had any canker sore medicine, and she gave me some chinese medicine that an indonesian friend of hers raves about.

now, i tend to be a little skeptical of medicines. i sometimes get bad side effects. and i like to know what i'm putting into my system, so i always read the ingredients label. granted, i don't always know what all those big words are, but it somehow comforts me just to read them. and if they seem too scary, i don't take the medicine.

i really wish i had my camera with me last night so i could take a picture of the ingredients list on this stuff. the entire rest of the bottle was in mandarin, but the ingredients were in english. the three that caught my eye were, in order of appearance: watermelon frost, borax, semen. pretty much everything else was a 12 syllable word ending in "ide".

i was (understandably, i hope) VERRRRRRY skeptical of this medicine. but kim said that her friend goes on and on about how good it is and how it works right away. so i took a risk and poured a little bit out on my finger. the shape of the bottle was similar to that of a bottle of eye drops. so i was expecting liquid, right? imagine my surprise when i dumped a miniature pile of rancid smelling dust on my finger instead. i thought there must be a problem and tried again. more dust.

so i shrugged my shoulders and rubbed it on my lips.

i'm still alive today, so i guess that's a good sign.

oh, and the canker sore is more canker and less sore.