{"id":1807,"date":"2018-01-04T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2018-01-04T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/?p=1807"},"modified":"2018-01-03T21:20:44","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T03:20:44","slug":"keeping-grounded-for-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/keeping-grounded-for-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping Grounded for 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

So now the new year is underway, and it’s time to buckle down and get to work, and keep my head on straight.\u00a0 Part of the problem with that is January is such a challenging time for me to do that, for two key reasons.<\/p>\n

Reason the first<\/strong>: I love living in Austin, it’s a wonderful city, but in January, the city wants to kill me.\u00a0 Namely, it releases SPORES OF CEDAR DOOM into the air and it takes high levels of allergy medications to stay functional.\u00a0 For real.\u00a0 Five years ago my reaction was so bad it gave me vertigo for two weeks.\u00a0 I literally couldn’t walk, and worse, couldn’t write.\u00a0 It was awful.\u00a0 Right now, even highly medicated, I’ve got light congestion and watery eyes.\u00a0 And I’ve been indoors most of the day.<\/p>\n

Reason the second:\u00a0<\/strong>For those who don’t know, the “day job”– which i put in the quotes because it isn’t just in the day, nor does it have regular hours either– is running our business Live the Language, where my wife teaches Spanish to children and adults.\u00a0 Now, if you run any business which provides Service X, where people will say to themselves, “I really should DO X this year”, January is when you get ALL THE INQUIRIES.\u00a0 It’s great, it’s the very lifeblood of our business, but it does mean my workload right now cranks up.<\/p>\n

So, given that’s just the normal Things of January, and add in the whole “2017 was a Trashfire Year, what is 2018 going to bring” aspect, how do I keep my head on straight and get work done?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Put some people on your social media who JUST BRING JOY.<\/strong>\u00a0 I’m talking make sure your feed has someone who just puts gifs of otters playing, or daily affirmations.\u00a0 Me, I’ve got a guy, who just plain loves Star Trek.\u00a0 And I mean, deep cut stuff.\u00a0 Like he’ll post about Ben Sisko’s outfits.\u00a0 But that’s what he does, he just LOVES STAR TREK, and man, just seeing that on a regular basis was a great counterbalance to the usual doom-and-gloom of the social media feed.\u00a0 And so therefore…<\/li>\n
  2. \u00a0Just stay the heck out of the Social Media.<\/strong>\u00a0 I mean, yeah: World is a Trashfire.\u00a0 But I’ve made peace with the fact that 98% of the Trashfire is stuff that doesn’t really mean much to me other than give me something to stress about.\u00a0 And, I mean, I am stressed, but frankly\u00a0I don’t need to know<\/em> the minutiae of the Trashfire.\u00a0 It doesn’t help anything.<\/li>\n
  3. Watching Superheroes.<\/strong>\u00a0 I’ve made no secret that I’m a total superhero junkie.\u00a0 And in the coming months the universe is giving me not only my beloved CW\/DC shows, but adding one more with\u00a0Black Lightning<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>And\u00a0Black Panther<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/em>comes out in a few weeks, and\u00a0Avengers: Infinity War<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/em>is a few months down the road.\u00a0 All this stuff is just tank-fueling joy for me.\u00a0 Sometimes when I get stuck on a scene I’ll rev up the Captain America Elevator Fight<\/a> or Everyone Fighting Nazis<\/a>\u00a0and a bit of that just clears my head and gets me back on track.\u00a0 (And, come on, how can you not love Supergirl saying to her Nazi Doppelganger, “General, would you care to step outside?”)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, that said, time to get back to work.\u00a0 I got plenty to do, and I’m not going to let this year hold me back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    So now the new year is underway, and it’s time to buckle down and get to work, and keep my head on straight.\u00a0 Part of the problem with that is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1808,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions\/1808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}