Steve Skojec

Think your ability to make and save money is safe? Think again.

Despite the shadow of a stomach flu that struck us down last night, leaving several members of the family (including myself) feeling like we just lost a title fight with E.Coli, I am still reveling in the Giants win last night over the Packers.

I’m not a sports fanatic, as anyone who reads me could probably tell by the utter lack of sports coverage, metaphors, or monday morning-posts. You will never hear me talk about first-round draft picks or the weaknesses in a given team’s secondary.

But make no mistake - football is, with the notable exception of Rugby, the BEST. SPORT. EVER. Though I played in High School, I find that I often ignore it as a spectator sport for extended periods of time. Chalk it up to my traveling extensively and spending the last 12 years of my life away from my native New York. There’s only one team I follow when I’m paying attention to the NFL, and I bleed blue. The New York Giants have given me something to both root for (and be crushingly disappointed in) since I was a child. Their fits and starts and seasons of promise that ended in a death-spiral of wasted potential have always felt to me like an appropriate metaphor for much that has happened in my own life.

So when they win, odd as it may seem, I feel a little bit better about me. In that sense, they serve as a sort of inspiration.

Last night’s game was incredible. It was the most suspenseful thing I’ve seen in as long as I can remember. It blew Cloverfield (which I saw on Friday) out of the water - and as an added bonus I didn’t have to deal with completely unnecessary migraine and nausea-inducing camera work.

Though the victory faded from mind as I spent the night in stomach cramps and taking care of every parent’s delight - vomiting children - I can’t help but feel a lingering sense of hopeful anticipation today about the forthcoming SuperBowl, which will take place in a stadium that was just being built near my home in Arizona when I left two years ago this month to come back East. Granted, the last time I felt this way, the Giants came off of a stunning victory against the Vikings to be utterly crushed and humiliated by the Ravens in front of the world’s biggest television audience.

This year, the pressure is on the Patriots. Nobody is expecting the Giants to win, and everyone just knows that the Patriots will. But the battle with Green Bay showed us something - it was a slug fest full of trials, errors, and missed opportunities. It was a fight to the death, and the Giants earned their win by overcoming hellacious weather, two missed field goals, an overturned touchdown, and some penalties and blown coverage that allowed Green Bay to score. The packers were the odds-on favorite last night, and the Giants were easily the better playing team, even if the final tally was close. The Patriots know this, as they almost had their perfect season handed back to them by the Giants in the final game before playoffs.

Like many guys, I find that I identify with scrappy underdogs, and this Giants team could just be the James J. Braddock of 2008. There is a chance - a very real chance - that for the first time in a long time I could wind up rooting for a winning cause.

And that makes it fun.

It snowed here yesterday, one of the few times it has all winter. This morning I got up and was treated to a spectacular sunrise:

It was a bit eerie. The fog was such that I could actually look directly at the sun (didn’t do this for long, of course) without it hurting. It looked more like the moon than anything.

One of the coolest mornings I’ve ever seen. Just thought I’d share.

I’ve often wondered what the heck the deal is with books for the “I like to rip pages” age group. The books weigh about five pounds and hurt like hell when your kids smack you in the face with them, but there’s really not much going on inside…

Granted, Giuliani’s campaign seems to borrow it’s strategy for success from Weekend at Bernie’s, but Ron Paul soundly defeated him in Michigan, with more than a 2-to-1 margin. He also beat Thompson by nearly as much.

It wasn’t just Michigan. Paul also beat Giuliani in Iowa, nearly beat him in New Hampshire, and did beat Thompson there.

He’s still only pulling 6-10% of the votes in these states, but he’s proving that the “viable” candidates aren’t always who we think they are, and that good ideas can trump narcissistic, lisping fascism and southern charm any day.

Those ideas are becoming part of the framework of this nation’s political debate. Ron Paul will probably never be President, but he is changing the game. Young men and women who will be voting for decades to come are becoming aware of civics, federalism and Constitutional government in ways that they probably never would have. I know it was an impetus for me to study and learn.

And provided that NSPD-51 doesn’t wind up being invoked to take away what’s left of the Constitutional government and put the power in one man’s hands, that could be a good thing for the future of America.

On behalf of Senator Larry Craig - whether he wants it or not - the ACLU has filed a brief arguing that “people who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy.”

Gross.

Seriously - I don’t like being in a stall next to someone who is doing their normal bathroom business, let alone doing the nasty. And in a public restroom stall, there’s no better term for it, because “nasty” is exactly what that sort of behavior is.

I also can’t really figure out how one would expect privacy in such a location. Every cough, grunt and trickle echoes around the room for everyone to hear. This is not a scenario I am really comfortable even envisioning, let alone describing to you, my poor readers, who by now are probably making awful faces at your screens.

All I can say is that there’s not enough Lysol in the world…

…to anyone who has ever attended a “Life Teen Mass”, that the founder of the group - still under indictment for sexual abuse charges - has begun a new non-denominational “Praise and Worship Center”.

Life Teen was, in my limited experience, essentially a not-rigidly denominational praise and worship group that simply maintained a thin veneer of Catholicism (much like my alma matter Franciscan University’s dominant spirituality, which took its charismatic character in part from the parish where Msgr. Fushek started the group). Many Catholics, including some of my friends, think groups like Life Teen serve a real purpose in the Church. Using the oft-repeated (and grammatically incorrect) cliché, “It’s important to meet people where they’re at”, these individuals believe that the bongo-drum beating, sanctuary violating, rock and roll concert emulating “masses” engage the youth culture and make them feel comfortable about becoming a Catholic.

Anyone with an ounce of sense in their head should know that one can’t make something they hold sacred appear “cool” in order to penetrate pop culture and the follies of youth without subverting the very transcendence of what they are trying to draw people to.  Worship is supposed to bring the faithful “up”, to elevate them above the mundane, daily realities they face. Reverence is found in silence, in music that is ordered in such a way that it both humbles and lifts the spirit, in a non-vernacular language, in incense and ceremony, in prayers of supplication, etc. Sublimation, not simplification, is the key.

Someone who feels the need to try to dumb Catholicism down and dress it in the trappings of modernity to make it attractive is like a person who goes onto a dating website and posts a picture of an attractive model rather than their own image. If it is a sign of immaturity and insecurity to pretend to be someone you are not because you don’t think people will like the real you, what does it say about your faith when you feel the need to disguise its true form in order to make it appealing? Not really a vote of confidence for the One True Faith, is it?

Msgr. Fushek, in my opinion, must never have had much regard for the faith as it is; he must simply have tried to make it look like what he wanted it to be. And what he wanted it to be was a non-denominational charismatic praise and worship group. Now that his public faculties have been suspended because of other alleged indiscretions, he finds no impediment in showing his true colors without the Catholic veneer.

It’s sad. A logical result of the flawed logic behind Life Teen’s creation, but sad, nonetheless.

UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me by a reader that the charismatic aspect of Franciscan University - which appears likely to have emerged there upon the arrival of Fr. Michael Scanlan in 1974 - pre-dates the founding of life teen in 1985. The history on this seems a bit murky to me, though I believe this is correct. I have always been under the impression, however, that St. Timothy’s parish in Mesa, AZ, where Life Teen was founded, has played a substantial role in providing students and a certain charismatic and youth-mass orientation to FUS.

If anyone knows more about the connection (or lack thereof, please leave a comment.)

I have always struggled with weight. I’m no scientist, but by looking at my relatives on both sides, I can see that there is an unmistakable predisposition toward rotundity in my genetic code. Not everyone has been struck by it, but it’s certainly there.

During my junior year of high school, I made my first attempt at being a homeschooler. I was fed up with public school and I plunged into the murky depths of learning at home. It wasn’t for me, but what was for me was the opportunity to get into shape. Going into that year, I weighed in at 214 pounds. I was pudgy and soft and felt quite far away from being the chick magnet I wanted to be. Granted, I was nearing my final height of 6′4″, and with broad shoulders and fairly large build overall, 214 wasn’t very fat. It wasn’t, however, where I wanted to be.

Performing little to no cardio (I always had asthma problems as a kid) I began crafting my own diet, high in carbs and extremely low in fat. The carbs weren’t intentional, they were simply the only things I could find that didn’t have much fat in them. I absolutely refused to snack, and never ate late at night. At the time, I didn’t care about alcohol, so that wasn’t an issue. I didn’t worry about sugar at all.

In the mornings, I did a bunch of crunches and bench presses, and that was pretty much my workout. At the end of six months, I had dropped 34 pounds and hit my lowest weight of 180 pounds. I thought I looked great. I could feel my abs with my hand on my stomach, even if they weren’t ripped, and I was lean as could be. Looking back on my pictures, I was emaciated. 180 was way, way too skinny for me. I also royally screwed up my blood sugar levels, and have suffered from low sugar attacks ever since. Don’t know if the two are related.

My senior year added back some of the weight, and I found myself at a healthy 206. I was exercising a lot, so it was a less flabby 206 than I had experienced before. The summer before college, I worked in a physically intensive job with a family of German farmboys in Idaho, and added another 10 pounds. I was back to 215 when I started my first semester at Steubenville, but I was in great shape.

College is fairly sedentary, however, and includes large quantities of foods like pizza and beer. After fluctuating up during the semesters and down during summer jobs that were very active, I graduated from college weighing 245. I was a bit more pudgy than I would have liked, but I was still in decent shape and had reasonably good reactions from the ladies. It was in fact at this time that I met my wife, who was at the time sporting a lovely physique of her own that was often well displayed through the use of miniskirts (which she has since gotten rid of…to both my relief and chagrin.)

There was a problem, however. Jamie and I both love to eat. In fact, our first real encounter was over lunch, where we discovered our mutual passion for food. I was also entering the phase of my life known as the “sedentary white collar career”, which involved increasingly longer commutes and even more epic stretches of time sitting on my butt in front of a computer screen under unnatural fluorescent lighting.

The pounds began to add up. They peaked just before my wedding, then I managed to fight them back down, only to move to a different place and schedule and allow them to stack back up. Now, as I mark the first full year of my thirties, I shudder to admit that it’s not a fluke, not simply the result of a binge or a bender, but that the scale consistently tells me something I utterly don’t want to hear.

I weigh 300 pounds. Yes, that’s THREE HUNDRED POUNDS.

Granted, a guy my size at three hundred can still see his toes, walk up stairs without panting for breath, and doesn’t look nearly like Jared before he did the Subway thing. But three hundred is three hundred. I’m carrying an extra hundred pounds over my senior year of high school. That’s like having an entire Ewok strapped to my chest, 24/7. (A full-grown Ewok. Not Wickett.)

The time has come for things to change. I’ve added 10 inches to my waist since high school. Stuff doesn’t fit that should. Tying my shoes without an elevated platform of some kind to rest my foot on is a chore. I’m sluggish and tired even when I get a good night’s sleep. I feel like crap, my back hurts, and I’m a chronic grump.

I used to have a little something called willpower. I find that concept elusive these days. I’m gone from home for nearly 12 hours a day, and when I arrive, I’ve got screaming babies to attend to, a frustrated wife, a messy home that said wife couldn’t stop from being destroyed by said babies while she was making dinner, and a whole butt-load of stress that I carry with me from day to day because of any number of reasons, including the fact that I’m a psychopathic worrier.

I could etch out a little bit of time at night to exercise, but it would be tough. When things finally settle down, the time I do have is coveted relaxation time, usually on a full belly. I still haven’t figured out the trick to waking up early and getting moving. I am a zombie when I awake. Exercise is as far from my mind as it can get.

So I have an uphill climb ahead of me. The fact is, I don’t want to weigh 500 pounds by the time I’m forty, or need quadruple bypass surgery before I qualify for a senior citizen discount, or become a diabetic like my grandfather (who also hit 300 at some point). I love my wife and kids, and I’d like to not only be around for them, but in a better mood. And of course, I really want to look better in my bikini…wait, no. Forget I said that.

So this is it. This is the first step toward accountability. This is me, telling you, my 3.7 readers, that you can nag or encourage me as you like, and heap scorn, derision and public humiliation on me if I fail. I have about 350 days left this year, and I want to lose thirty pounds. This is, I think, a reasonable (if not nearly sufficient) goal. It’s 0.08 pounds a day, or 2.5 pounds a month.

I should be able to do this. I plan on updating on the first of each month to say how things are going. Maybe at the end of the year I’ll post before and after photos - but only if I don’t shower or shave in the before photos and can airbrush the after photos and wear my most slimming clothes and have über-stylish hair.

With any luck, maybe I can lose more. This isn’t just a cliché New Year’s resolution weight loss thing, either. This is one of several big goals I have this year, which include getting evaluated by a medical professional for my ADD/Anxiety issues and seeing my own writing in print in a real publication of some kind.

I’m terrible about goal-setting and goal-accomplishing, but I’m going to give it an honest-to-goodness try.

Let the fat jokes begin.

Whether you like what they have to say or not, sometimes you have to just stop and thank God for guys who say what we need to hear - guys like Ron Paul, Glenn Beck, and David Walker.

Okay, so you’ve heard of the first two, but who is the third? He’s the head of the GAO - the Government Accountability Office (which I have repeatedly joked to my wife as we walk by its ginormous expanse on the way to Mass needs to be much, much bigger) - making him the chief accountant for the U.S. Government.

What he has to say about our economic future isn’t very encouraging: