New Year's Resolutions...

... are made with the best of intentions, but often don't last.

This is a fact of life.

Now, with that point stated, I would like to let you all know what my New Year's Resolution of 2010 was! I vowed to resurrect the Conquistadors.... to trigger a phoenix-esque rebirth of this blog and all it stands for! Or would that be Quetzalcoatl-esque? Whatever the case, I want to see this blog flourish.

I have a few reasons.

First and foremost, I'm starting a job tomorrow as a public relations intern with Dix & Eaton downtown in Cleveland. I will be working full-time doing challenging communication work for the first time in my life! The best part? I don't get paid.

Wait, worst part.

Yes indeed, I will be learning the ways of the ever-buzzing socialite... and for this reason I predict an innate need is brewing deep within me to be trendy and creative in all parts of my life. How do I do this? Well, I suppose I could blog (check), tweet a lot (check), work on my writing abilities (check), and think outside the box during mundane daily activities... like cooking. Hmm... sounds like a good excuse to work on this here writin' space.

Secondly, and much simpler to understand, is that I got Je Sais Cuisiner ("I Know How To Cook")... the three generation old French cooking "bible" for Christmas and I have roughly 1,000 pages of reading / cooking to do on that front. Also for my birthday I got "Momofuku", a very complex book by famous chef David Chang featuring lots of interesting, NY restaurant-grade Asian-American fusion cooking. I don't have much of an excuse to NOT cook tbh.

Finally, we spent a week around Christmas in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and trust me, I ate some straaaange food. Much of which I still, to this day, cannot identify due to poor translations along the way. I survived (with mild symptoms), but my eyes were further widened to the wide array of culinary arts around the world and the possibilities rendered by various cultures. I'm into that.

So there are my reasons. The good intentions of the resolution, if you will. Now for the latter part... the "not always working out". See, I am one of two Conquistadors, the other being my rather brilliant (Yale, Harvard, Princeton... they all want him badly, no joke... he's in 11th grade), yet highly lethargic brother, Matty. Matty would lay with a cell phone in one hand and a Nintendo DS in the other all day long if he could, and unfortunately he has academic and extracurricular events regularly that he uses as convenient excuses. If I can't motivate him, this endeavor may be doomed.

That being said, I'm going to try. Hard. The world is full of interesting flavors and associated tomfoolery, and we can certainly spare some of our "wastin' time" generally reserved for inane chatter, videogames, and Youtube videos to tackle said eats. You'll know soon enough if I've been successful. Wish me the best. Hope to post again soon...