Frog blog guy's foolproof hiccup cure
Once upon a time, in times of old, before the age of social media, I stumbled upon some guy's blog that had a truly life-changing piece of knowledge for my nine-year-old brain.
I have tried for the life of me to find his blog as an adult, but I have had to admit defeat. All I can remember about it is that it was frog-themed and that, in his brilliance, the man imparted knowledge to me that has made me all but immune to the hiccups condition. To this day, when I see people waiting out their hiccups and just sitting there really annoyed, I sit and wonder: don't you know? Have you not read the ancient texts?
As a kid, I have seen and heard of all types of wacky hiccup cures because kids always have hiccups. What is that? Is it because no one imparts the sacred knowledge of the frog blog guy?
What about that one guy who had hiccups for like 70 years? Did he figure it out one day? I think his just disappeared one day. How?
Instead of waiting out hiccups or trying to distract oneself from them, the frog blog guy's blog entry about his hiccup cure taught me this:
Focus on nothing but your next hiccup for one full minute. Meditate on it. Anticipate how it will feel and think about nothing else. If a hiccup happens, concentrate on the next one. Do not talk. Do not get distracted. Focus, and your hiccups will be gone.
Blogging again is weird. I remember writing often. Social media was never quite the same, and now it is all about marketing, content, and ads. Yet, nothing has ever left as big of an impression on me as this one guy's blog entry. I have been telling people about his hiccup cure ever since. Someone has hiccups that won't go away? I immediately tell them what to do. Their hiccups go away. As long as they do exactly as frog blog guy instructed me, their hiccups are cured. 100% success rate.
I think I want to share things that might be useful, but is that a sign that I have been advertised to for too long? That what I share has to be useful or relevant to someone? But there's a lot I know that might be helpful for someone to know, like frog blog guy's hiccup cure. He cared enough about it to publish an entire blog entry dedicated to just that. And it helped me. And it helped others for decades. I don't think anything I've ever seen on social media has had as much of a butterfly effect.
And yet, I've emboldened the hiccup cure in this entry so that someone could view my blog post, see what the hiccup cure was, and then back button away to continue on. Have you ever thought about how people complain about searching for recipes online and having to parse through the writer's personal stories? What’s the use of reading someone's blog entry about how their recipe was passed down through their family and now they're sharing it with the world? What’s useful about knowing a person's experience cooking with their child and what they have taught them through a particular recipe? Why not skip all the cultural context someone shared about a recipe’s unique history within their culture? No one should feel guilty about just skipping to the recipe. It's just that I wonder how much I've been influenced to filter what I want to say. There's something a little sad about that, but there's also something fantastic about learning something someone randomly chose to share, that wouldn't have been shared through any marketing platform.