two

actually the number two IRL

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Recipe for Grounding

If you’re anything like me sometimes existence can get overwhelming. Sometimes, especially back when I was new, it felt like each little thing was going to be one too many things to handle. It was a lot. And that was okay. It was okay to need a moment to myself. It was okay to need to take a pause to ground myself. So I’d like to take a moment to pass on a little trick that Fish taught me to help me when I got lost in my own metaphorical head. I know this isn’t really a recipe, technically speaking, but, well to me cooking was never really about the food anyway. It was about the people I love. Whether it’s honoring them, feeling connected to them, or doing something for them, that's what these recipes were always about to me. And I can think of nothing more suited to being in these pages than one of the greatest gifts they ever gave to me.

Ingredients

You don’t need anything but yourself and your senses, but it doesn’t hurt to have someone you trust there to help you. Even after I learned the steps, it always helped me to have Fish, Landry, or Paula there to talk me through it. It’s also worth noting that this recipe is highly modifiable. What works for someone might not work for everyone and even if the theory works not everyone has the same sensory experiences. Please change what you need. Add or remove what you need. Following the instructions to the letter is less important than giving yourself something to focus on.

Directions

Take a slow, deep breath.

Focus on what’s around you. Look for 5 things you can see and name them either out loud or individually in your head. It can be general or specific, just whatever comes to your head. I see a blaseball. I see Hiroto on the mound. I see the dugout. I see the mitt of my glove. I see a stray scorpion, scuttling back to join the rest of Scorpler.

Focus on your body and think of 4 things you can feel.
Name them. I feel the bat in my hand. I feel the warmth of the Sun 2. I feel the adrenaline of a new game. I feel the hand of Landry’s host on my page.

Focus on listening. Name 3 things you can hear. I hear the crowd cheering in the stands. I heard Dunlap rehearsing a monologue under zir breath. I hear Yazmin’s hooves as she moved around the dugout.

Next comes smell. If you need to move to be able to do this I really recommend doing so. If you can’t or you’re having a hard time finding a smell, think about your favorite smells and name them instead. I smell Landry’s ozone, permeating from his newest host. I smell the baked bread I made earlier that morning.

Now name one thing you can taste. Once again, don’t be afraid to move to find something to taste or reach back and focus on your favorite taste. I can taste the anticipation of a good game.

Finally, end with another deep breath. Repeat as needed.


so the Moody Cookbook is a Blaseball fan project: a huge cookbook, with recipes "from" various Blaseball characters (if you don't understand what Blaseball is, don't worry, this post is not going to make it any clearer). The recipes in there range from very good, mostly normal food, to recipes that, if followed, will most certainly upset your local fire department.
A recipe called "Fire Eater" from Fish Summer, serves 1. It says "You're going to want to stand back". Ingredients: 2 tbsp fish sauce, 1 cup charcoal. Directions: "bring to a boil over high heat / pour over coffee of your choice". Near the recipe's title is a symbol of a closed book with a large 0 printed on its front.


Thankfully the book has an edibility rating for each recipe so you know what's good. I haven't done much cooking from it yet but I will say that the Peptack (pepsi hardtack) is surprisingly pretty good even though the book rates it "Neutral". The pepsi flavour is very slight, so it's mostly just a slightly-sweet hardtack, which is nice.1

The Recipe for Grounding is another thing that surprised me in this book. It's not a food recipe and it's not original to the book; I'd heard about the "name 5 things you can see..." thing before reading it here (looking it up now it's called the "54321 technique" and shows up in a lot of places), but I had always discounted it as being too specific, one of those weird "life hacks" like taking breaths at a particular speed or holding cold water to your forehead to convince your nervous system you're drowning.2

But the Moody Cookbook's version of the instructions makes it clear that the specific steps are arbitrary, the important thing is just that it gives you something else to think about, and this got me to try it out.3 In my experience so far it's pretty effective! The fact that it's overly specific is honestly a bonus: I find it's easy to remember an order of five things while enumerating sensory inputs while I'm not spending brain power on panicking, but when I actually need to use this I often manage to get to the end with "two things I can taste- wait, that can't be right", so I run through it from the beginning, more thoughtfully.

Maybe this recipe will also be useful to you, but if not, I promise you that pepsi hardtack really is worth a go.


  1. Pepsi variants (including Pepsi Max, which is for some reason much easier to find in Australia than regular pepsi) use aspartame as a sweetener, which I think isn't stable if you cook it, so do make sure you use a pepsi that's actually sweetened with some sort of sugar.
  2. No I can't find a source on this one. I think somebody on reddit swore by it, but in hindsight, it sounds very silly.
  3. Apparently I trust the advice of a fictional sentient book from the fan lore of a video game about baseball more than that of the medical profession at large.

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in reply to @two's post:

Oh, having it be a diving reflex makes a lot more sense than a drowning reflex, lol. I was beginning to wonder how on earth that was meant to be calming.