Steve Skojec

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

It’s 90+ degrees and I’m already worried about keeping the family from freezing this winter while still putting food on the table. The house we’re renting (renting being the key here) has an oil-burning boiler that heats the home through baseboard units. We moved into this place in February, and by the end of March we’d used 125 gallons of oil, with the thermostat kept at 60-65F most of the time.

With heating oil prices climbing toward $5 a gallon, that’s roughly $300 a month on oil during the end of the winter, not the coldest part.

Did I mention I’m worried?

This house is drafty, the windows all need to be replaced, and the upstairs loses a lot more heat than the downstairs because the downstairs exterior is brick. I can’t make modifications of any kind to the house because I don’t own it, so I’m looking for temporary solutions to augment our heating this winter in a cost-effective way that will allow us to keep the thermostat on the boiler as low as possible without the pipes freezing.

I know I’ve got a lot of smart readers out there who have learned by trial and error how to be thrifty and live sustainably for all the right reasons. I would love, love, love to get your input on this if you have time.

One other thing - we do have a wood-burning open-hearth fireplace in one room downstairs against the garage wall, but it seems to offer very little heat and I’ve always heard that fireplaces suck more warmth out than they bring in. Don’t know if there’s any way around that.

Thanks in advance to those of you who will be filling the comm-box (hint, hint) with good ideas!

I’m evaluating two potential courses of study - the first is History with a heavy concentration on Church and Society at Catholic University, the second is Theology with a focus on systematics and Church History at Christendom’s grad school.

See, for me, it’s all about the integration of culture and The Faith, and that means getting a grasp on the goings on during the Late Medieval to Early Modern (and current) time period, which should help trace the course of, as Hilary likes to call it, The Collapse.

On the one hand, History is probably the more marketable degree at a wider range of places. On the other, I have a slightly stronger aptitude for Theology, and Christendom’s grad program is literally three times cheaper, and more easily accessible for me.

Whichever MA I go for, I’m guessing I’ll be locked on that path if I wind up entering a PhD program (which I will probably have to do if I ever want to teach at the college level). Any thoughts out there from the wide world on which path might fill the greater need? This is down to logistics, interest, and a bit of coin-tossing. I’m leaning toward the History MA being more interesting in the short term and possibly more likely to net me the right job, but the more difficult to obtain because of finances and class schedule. I’m also a little concerned about being locked into History for the eventual PhD (if and when that happens). I’d prefer to mix and match, honestly, but that could get dicey with prerequisites and all.

As you may have noticed, I like bouncing ideas off of people when I have no idea what I’m doing. Helps me figure out what I’m really thinking.

(Gross, but in a funny way):

But his review of the much anticipated (by me as well as the rest of the Batman-loving world) The Dark Knight earns a link and a full re-post:

Heath Ledger Ruins Dark Knight

Heath Ledger’s indulgent, cartoonish performance ruins Dark Knight. In a movie filled with restrained performances, Ledger’s slow-chatter Joker comes off as not just deranged but deranging.

Like a malevolent poltergeist, Ledger moves the film’s furniture into nonsensical patterns. He unbalances the film. Although critics are lionizing his performance as darkly brilliant, the truth is that his Joker is all surface evil with no depth. It isn’t frightening, except in the way that a glass of spilled red-wine is frightening. It gets all over everything and the stain won’t come out.

As the Joker he seems to be channeling that stupid clown from Stephen King’s insipid It. This would be a career ending performance if it weren’t already too late for that.

People say Ledger’s death was untimely but it couldn’t have been better timed. He’s the only person involved with his movie who’s lucky enough not to have to see his performance in it. And death seems to have been a great career move. It’s hard not to suspect that the film’s editors were spooked out of cutting his performance down to size.

(WARNING SPOILERS: I haven’t actually seen the film, and so I formulated this opinion without any basis whatsoever. I just figured it was about time to start the backlash and no one else seemed willing to do it. Speaking ill of the dead is a nasty business but someone had to do it.)

(H/T to Michael Brendan Dougherty and his massive Tumblr blog)

Things are afoot.

Money, that thing we’re not supposed to worship and yet the obtainment of which occupies the majority of our time, is in decidedly short supply these days, and growing shorter.

Word has come down from upon corporate high that all further allotments of pay, including cost of living increases, have been frozen, due to issues affecting revenue, including (but not limited to) the state of the economy.  While this is certainly understandable, the very same economy has prompted the grocery store, gas station, train service, and utility providers to demand ever more cash from me in exchange for even fewer goods and services. They don’t seem interested at all when I tell them I will have to continue paying them the same amount as ever. Thus is the dilemma of life.

Further, my long-suffering friend who has been renting a room from in our house since late 2006 is getting ready to move on, making things that much tighter for us. Even if he stays, a suddenly deteriorating relationship with my landlord, whom I suspect is growing tired of fixing all the things that keep breaking, has indicated that since said friend is not actually on the lease, he may want to begin charging us more for his presence.

We already pay $1900 a month, plus utilities, and the home is heated by oil, which is burned in a boiler that is so inefficient that it consumes between $500 and $1000 a month of black gold, depending on how much antifreeze we want to use to cut the children’s juice.

For my part, a growing sense of discontentment is driving me back to the idea that I shared with you in the late summer of 2006, namely, that the passion and talent I seem to have for doing what I do in this space needs to be expanded into the way I make my living. Nothing else really satisfies. I got derailed during the last financial crisis that hit our family, but I told my present employer during the interview process that my goal in the long run was to go back to school and eventually to teach. I am receiving the irresistible promptings to get moving on that again, and while it seems on the surface counterintuitive to spend money to go to school to get a job that for the immediate term will pay me less, not all compensation is measured in dollars. I can’t escape the feeling that I have been running from a calling in order to better provide financially for my family, only to feel constantly thwarted in being successful in that regard. They always say, “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” While that may be too idealistic, I have evidence that the reverse may in fact be true. All I can do is do my best to do the work I have, while trying to discern what work will be better for me.

So I’ve begun evaluating grad schools, of course too late in the process to get scholarships. (If there are any benefactors out there, I am not above charity!) With luck, I may find an affordable program that will not conflict too much with work, and begin training myself for the next thing. Hopefully, the best thing.

Finally, and certainly not least importantly, the day after father’s day I was informed that we are expecting our fourth child. While this is certainly joyful news, it comes with a bit of trepidation, as it’s the first pregnancy since Jamie had her surgery earlier this year, and there could be complications. Additionally, the baby is due in February, almost on the day when our lease ends, and moving and giving birth are not good bedfellows (and our relationship with the landlord not being stellar, it’s not a lease I want to extend).

All the same, it’s been my experience that God provides more just as the incoming children seem ready to use up the last resources you’ve got, so my trust is in Him. In fact, we just enthroned our current residence to the Sacred Heart last weekend. (One must always attempt to ensure a 1st-class ticket on the faith train.)

All of this is to say - I have a lot on my mind, and when I’m writing here, I’m not writing for money. I haven’t had a column published since May. There’s something about blogging that satisfies (in my case, anyway) the immediacy of the writer’s urge, and takes the edge off the colder, slower process of producing publishable work. Not that I haven’t tried, it’s just that nothing I’ve written has been quite what it needed to be to be useful to anyone.

While I will continue to drop posts here as whim dictates, I’ve got to withdraw somewhat, at least for a while. Blogging may be a sort of therapy, which is why I always come back to it right after I say I have to cool it, but it’s also a sinkhole into which it’s too easy to throw time and effort that might be better spent.

If you can keep our family in your prayers, as we navigate these obstacles, I would be extremely greatful. Even if I don’t know who you are, I will keep my benefactors, spiritual or otherwise, on my own list of intentions.

While we’re on the topic:

A San Francisco city and county board resolution that officially labeled the Catholic church’s moral teachings on homosexuality as “insulting to all San Franciscans,” “hateful,” “defamatory,” “insensitive” and “ignorant” will be challenged tomorrow in court for violating the Constitution’s prohibition of government hostility toward religion.

[snip]

Since no law was enacted, she ruled, city officials – even in their official capacity as representatives of the government – can say what they want.

“It is merely the exercise of free speech rights by duly elected office holders,” she wrote.

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, which is appealing the District Court decision on behalf of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and two Catholic residents of San Francisco, disagrees with Patel’s decision.

“Sadly, the ruling itself clearly exhibited hostility toward the Catholic Church,” he said in a statement. “The judge in her written decision held that the Church ‘provoked the debate’ by publicly expressing its moral teaching, and that by passing the resolution the City responded ‘responsibly’ to all of the ‘terrible’ things the Church was saying.”

Thomas More attorney Robert Muise will present oral arguments in the case tomorrow morning in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Our Constitution plainly forbids hostility toward any religion, including the Catholic faith,” he said.

“In total disregard for the Constitution, homosexual activists in positions of authority in San Francisco have abused their authority as government officials and misused the instruments of the government to attack the Catholic Church. Their egregious abuse of power has now the backing of a lower federal court. … Unfortunately, all too often we see a double standard being applied in Establishment Clause cases,” Muise said.

Thomas More attorneys argued in the District Court case that the “anti-Catholic resolution sends a clear message” that Catholics are “outsiders, not full members of the political community.”

The cultural, and now political, straight-arm to adherents of the Christian faith in San Francisco has been increasingly public in the last two years. Just one week after the anti-Catholic resolution was passed, the San Francisco Board issued a similar resolution against a mostly evangelical group.

Following a gathering of 25,000 teens at San Francisco’s AT&T Park as part of Ron Luce’s Teen Mania “Battle Cry for a Generation” rally against the sexualization of America’s youth culture by advertisers and media, the board spoke out formally again.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution condemning the “act of provocation” by what it termed an “anti-gay,” “anti-choice” organization that aimed to “negatively influence the politics of America’s most tolerant and progressive city.”

Openly homosexual California Assemblyman Mark Leno told protesters of the teen rally that though such religious people may be few, “they’re loud, they’re obnoxious, they’re disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco.”

[snip]

Currently, as WND has reported, Colorado and Michigan are tackling the question of whether the Bible itself can be vilified as “hate speech” for it’s condemnation of homosexuality, and Canada has developed human rights commissions, which have decided people cannot express opposition to homosexuality without fear of government reprisal.

This is the difference between the position that I hold and those expressed in my comment box yesterday: I oppose legalizing and promoting behaviors which I believe are immoral but do NOT oppose the Constitutional right of those who hold opposing views to speak about them or associate as a group; homosexual activists want to use the government’s power as a weapon against people who disagree with them and strip them of the freedoms to which they are already entitled by law.

Ezra Levant was a case study. Don’t believe for a moment that those who want to silence the voices advocating traditional morality won’t learn from the mistakes of Canada’s Human Rights Commission and try again. There is a growing contempt for the belief that the homosexual lifestyle is sinful and destructive to the soul, and that “homosexual marriage” is a contradiction in terms - a contradiction made possible through the weakening of our understanding that children are the primary good of marriage, a weakening produced by the widespread adoption of contraception. Our beliefs on marriage and sexuality are now considered thought crimes, no doubt a thought “hate crimes” by those who advocate that sexual pleasure and the desire for interpersonal intimacy alone should define marriage and relationships.

A century ago, Chesterton captured with elegant simplicity what is wrong with that sort of definition:

“The creation of a new creature, not ourselves, of a new conscious centre, of a new and independent focus of experience and enjoyment, is an immeasurably more grand and godlike act that even a real love affair; how much more superior to a momentary physical satisfaction. If creating another self is not noble, why is pure self-indulgence nobler?”

G.K. Chesterton, “Blasphemy and the Baby,” reprinted in Brave New Family

Chesterton’s wisdom has long since been overruled, and those of us who are willing to accept as many children as God desires to grant us are scorned for for placing a priority on procreation over pleasure.

Ultimately, I assume, the difference in approach can be attributed to eschatology - for Catholics, we must work for a just and moral society, but we know that Christ is the arbiter of all things and will sit in final judgement. We have a sense of urgency, but not a sense of desperation, and certainly not a need for vengeance.

But to those who feel hated because we love them enough to tell them that what they are doing is wrong, and will imperil their eternal happiness, the desire is strongest to simply shut us up. To make us go away. To harass us sufficiently with charges of “hate speech” and “defamation” and “insensitivity” that we will no longer be able to afford to fight their legal challenges.

They champion free speech unless it is our free speech; they champion the separation of church and state but not of ideology and state; and when all is said and done, they have the sympathy of the secular society and there seems to be only so much we can do to stop them.

Forgive me if I find it hard to swallow when I am accused of taking a play from their book simply because I disapprove of their agenda.

This morning, as I getting ready to go to work, Ivan found my pipe on my desk, and immediately began puffing on it. I almost never actually use it, so I don’t know where he got the idea from, but in an instant he was holding it by the bowl and pointing with it like a pro.

As I left, the last thing I saw was the little runt standing there, holding the pipe in the side of his mouth with one hand and waving with the other, a mischeivous grin on his face.

Lord, grant me more boys. They crack me up.

(H/T to Margaret Cabaniss)

I am wondering what unclean spirit is handed down from one child to the next in my family. Sophia (age: 32 months) was the nightmare beast from the deep for the better part of the last few months, every time she had to go to bed. Once the stories were over, prayers were said, kisses were given, and she was tucked safely in…that was when the blood-curdling screaming began.

Ivan (age: 19 months), on the other hand, having been the beneficiary of wisdom gleaned from the Princess Who Would Not Sleep, was on a schedule from the minute we could get him on one. Bedtime came around, we plunked him down in his crib, and he would wait patiently for us to cover him while he drifted immediately to the land of little-boy dreams.

Then, approximately two weeks ago, Sophia conquered her fear of the night. She simply stopped being so upset, and would go to bed and to sleep with minimal fuss and virtually no crying, if any.

AT THE EXACT SAME MOMENT, Ivan became emboldened by the spirit of the Prince of Terror, taking bedtime screaming to heights that Sophia could never have scaled in even her darkest furies. I’m talking larynx-busting, window-shattering, curse-your-damn-Catholic-openness-to-life inspiring noise from the pits of hell.

And it has gone on like that, each night, ever since. Naps have been curtailed. Schedules adjusted. Soothing attempted. We’ve even adopted the, “Oh just let him cry it out, as long as it takes, and once you do that he’ll be fine. ”

Nope. Not fine. We haven’t had a moment’s peace prior to 10PM in quite some time. And 10PM is pretty darn close to my bedtime, considering that I have a mighty commute to undergo in the morning.

What in the name of heaven is wrong with my children? It is probably good that they are insanely cute, or I might just be tempted to sell them to the U.S. Government to be used by interrogators. You think WATERBOARDING is torture? Put my kids at bedtime in with Osama Bin Laden himself, and he’ll crack in five minutes. Oh, he’ll crack like Humpty Dumpty.

And by the way, if you didn’t get the reference in the title, it’s probably because you’ve never seen this.

Last night, a friend and I were discussing the death of Tony Snow. Acknowledging the fact that Snow was a Catholic, as was Tim Russert, my friend asked, “Don’t you feel like there are more and more Catholics in public life, even if not all of them are exemplary Catholics?”

I’m not sure how to answer this, because I don’t have a basis of comparison. But I do know that many well-known Catholics either don’t know or don’t care much about what their faith really teaches. And yet they still self-identify. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity come to mind. Well-known people who are in a position of influence, and yet do nothing to utilize their positions for the spread of the faith.

In fact, according to the CIA World Fact Book, Roman Catholics comprise nearly 24% of the U.S. population. That is the single largest denomination (Protestants of all stripes are lumped together at 51%) in the country.

You would think, then, that we could exert some influence here, but we don’t seem to be getting much traction. And yet, with a homosexual population in this country that is estimated to comprise (depending on where you get your data) anywhere between 1% and 10%, they are driving their agenda home, day in and day out.

Case in point: an article that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post, entitled, “Owning His Gay Identity — At 15-Years Old“. The theme of acceptance of abnormal behavior is driven home, again and again:

School’s out, and Saro Harvey and his best friend, Samantha Sachs, are hanging out in his Arlington County bedroom. She is slouched across his bed, and he is poised on a chair, posture-perfect, wearing dark, skinny jeans and a ruffled shirt meant for a girl. A rust-orange purse he sometimes carries hangs behind the door.

The 15-year-olds were voted most popular last spring in their section of ninth grade at Wakefield High School. Still, Saro knows there are those on and off campus who don’t like him, who never will.

He has grown so used to the stares and laughter of strangers that their insults slip off his 118-pound frame like an oversize shirt.

[snip]

In recent years, 110 Gay Straight Alliance clubs, which are common in high schools nationwide, have sprouted in middle schools, including nine in Maryland and Virginia. Kevin Jennings, the founder of the first club, said he “never anticipated” they would also form in middle grades. His organization, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, is creating age-appropriate pamphlets to respond to the trend.

This year, students in 1,046 middle schools took part in the Day of Silence, a protest against LGBT intolerance, organizers said, double the participation level of the previous year.

“Unlike people of my generation, where there was very little visibility and a great sense of sadness, these kids know gay people are out there,” Jennings said. “They have a language now to understand their feelings.”

[snip]

Days before school let out for summer, the pizza had arrived in John Clisham’s office at Wakefield High, and the students in the GSA club were spread across the sofa and chairs.

One girl told how she was writing her senior project on same-sex marriage. Another explained how in the past few years many girls at the school, especially African Americans, had started saying they were bisexual, thinking it was cool.

A junior told how he fell into his first “gay talk” in fourth grade. His foster mother had asked why he was so into the red Power Ranger. “I said, ‘I don’t know; you tell me.’ ”

Everyone laughed.

[snip]

Doris Jackson, the principal of Wakefield, said the school does not tolerate bullying for any reason. “To me, it’s more than having a policy and enforcing it. It’s establishing an environment of tolerance of everyone,” she said, adding that the school even provides a separate restroom for a transgender student so the person is not forced to use the girl’s room or boy’s room. “When we say we are very diverse, people think racially. But we are diverse racially, culturally, [by] sexual orientation and socio-economic level. Being gay here doesn’t set you apart. You’re just another kid with something about you that is unique.”

Why are they winning the ideological war? Why can’t we get a foothold? In the so-called “marketplace of ideas”, why can’t a quarter of the population of this country get an inch of wiggle room, even if only a portion of that percentage actually care enough to try?

Never have so many given up so much to so few.