In celebration of my blog being a year old, I seem to have completely forgotten to write any posts for the last month. I started this blog with the intention of capturing stories of my family and my observations about life, culture and identity. I think I’ve successfully filled this site with random ramblings and goofy photos from my childhood. So there goes 2014…I wonder what 2015’s Culture Stew will shape up to be.

Maybe I’ll just start making up wild lies about my life: “Adventures from Clown School”…”My Month Among the Wildebeests”, “How I Got Run Over By an 83-Year Old Drunk Guy in a Buick and Lived to Tell the Tale…” ok, one of those is true.

What is it about New Year’s Resolutions? Why do we tend to start out so energetic and committed and then as the weeks and months go by we completely lose our momentum? By June (ok, March) we’ve already left the vegan-P90X-juice-cleanse-daily-meditation-write-in-my-journal-spend-quality-time-with family-call-friends-read-Don-Quijote-in-Spanish-learn-Cantonese promises far behind and instead find ourselves sitting at our desks all day at work, pounding doughnuts, checking Facebook for nothing of interest, and counting the days on our iCalendar until the next Federal holiday so we can sleep in and have an excuse to watch marathons of Breaking Amish.

In his autobiography, Ben Franklin wrote about the daily rituals he committed to for the entirety of his adulthood to practice a life of productivity and effectiveness. He literally wrote down daily a schedule for himself to ensure that every moment was used to its fullest. Stephen Covey created a cult following based on the same principles of productivity and effectiveness in life. There are so many self-help books out there on this stuff it’s dizzying. Most of us know that one person who always seems to be doing better than everyone else at balancing their life and being successful and productive every minute of the day. What are the rest of us doing-or not doing-that leads us to fall back into habits we loathe in ourselves? To break our own promises to ourselves year after year? Why can’t we just lose that last damn 10 pounds and keep it off? Or go for that graduate degree? Or write that book? Or volunteer 5 hours a week?

Because Breaking Amish is on in 5 minutes…oh hell, we’ll start being good tomorrow.

Mañana, mañana,

Mañana is soon enough for me!