Steve Skojec

I feel a little bit like I’m in one of those Nationwide commercials. Things seem to be happening as fast or faster than I can react to them (then again, I’m a little slow).

We’ve been trying to get out of our lease because our situation has changed somewhat and it’s no longer a viable place for us to be. We’re in the midst of negotiations, but the landlord has tenatively offered us the lowest penalty if we are able to move out by September 15th. That’s three weeks to pack up, get rid of what we can, find a place, and get the heck out of dodge. It’s also three weeks to try to negotiate a buyout that we can handle (which makes us really limited) and still wind up with enough to put a deposit on something else.

In the mean time, I have a work committment on one of the three remaining Saturdays, and if I get final confirmation that I am accepted into school, I will be starting classes around September 2nd. That’ll add four hours of class two or three days a week on top of work, commuting, packing, and crying in my beer. We’re trying to move in a counter intuitive direction to what we have been attempting for the last few years - moving closer into the city so work and school would be only a few minutes away, rather than a few hours, and sacrificing having the space and the yard until I can grab hold of a degree that I can take with me to some place less expensive so we can really have our little place with some land for the kids to roam and the garden to grow like we’ve always wanted, without me needing to be tethered to some big, long-commute city for an income. If we can find a place where we can get by on less, we’ll wind up making due just fine, I imagine, and may find that we wind up with more. Like a family life that consists of more than an hour or two at night and frantic weekends playing catch-up. No pain, no gain, I guess.

I am a worryer - an anxious person by nature. I’ve been wound up so tightly lately with everything that’s going on that I have to make very conscious efforts to chill out and not snap at people. My wife is a saint, and even in the midst of her pregnancy, which is now creeping closer to the time when potential complications from her surgery earlier this year might manifest, she keeps telling me its an adventure and not to worry and that we’ll get it all done. I want to believe. I want to believe. I want to believe.

Suffice it to say, there’s no telling what I’ll have time for. If I can sneak in some blogging I may, if for no other reason than that it’s therapeutic. Writing puts me in a zone for a little while where the outside stuff goes away and I can just focus on an issue. If I am in and out, though, or disappear, know that it’s because things are a bit nuts right now, and if you could spare some prayers, I would really appreciate them. I’m going to God big-time with all of this stuff, because there are too many moving pieces for me to plan effectively, even if I really was able to see the best path. Until then, I guess I just have to keep reminding myself that, “Fear is useless: What is needed is trust.” (Mk. 5:36)

I’m sure I’m not the only one amused by the fact that Obama picked Joe Biden to be his VP. It must be due to Biden’s strong praise of Obama back in January of 2007:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy … I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

For the record, Biden also said about Obama:

“I think he can be ready, but right now, I don’t believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training,”

Sounds like a match made in heaven then. Never fails to amaze who these guys will climb into bed with if they think it will help them win.

For a special intention. Thank you!

Anyone up for one?

Most states don’t recognize gay marriage — but now Hallmark does.

The nation’s largest greeting card company is rolling out same-sex wedding cards — featuring two tuxedos, overlapping hearts or intertwined flowers, with best wishes inside. “Two hearts. One promise,” one says.

Hallmark added the cards after California joined Massachusetts as the only U.S. states with legal gay marriage. A handful of other states have recognized same-sex civil unions.

The language inside the cards is neutral, with no mention of wedding or marriage, making them also suitable for a commitment ceremony. Hallmark says the move is a response to consumer demand, not any political pressure.

“It’s our goal to be as relevant as possible to as many people as we can,” Hallmark spokeswoman Sarah Gronberg Kolell said.

Hallmark’s largest competitor, American Greetings Corp., has no plans to enter the market, saying its current offerings are general enough to speak to a lot of different relationships.

Hallmark started offering “coming out” cards last year, and the four designs of same-sex marriage cards are being gradually released this summer and will be widely available by next year. No sales figures were available yet.

“When I have shopped for situations like babies or weddings for gay friends I have good luck in quirky stores,” said Kathryn Hamm, president of the Web site gayweddings.com.

“But if you are just in a generic store … the bride and groom symbol or words are in most cards,” she said. “It becomes difficult to find some that are neutral but have some style.”

I found a cool widget that I can plug my current reading materials into, and when you click them you can get a handy link to Amazon’s product page for that book. Considering that my posts are so heavily influenced by what I’m reading on any given day, I thought it would add a nice bit of context and make me look smarter too.

You’ll notice that as I continue the tough slog through the incredibly short (and yet somehow insufferably dense) Essay on the Restoration of Property by Belloc, I decided in fairness to the free market position to pick up Tom Woods’ The Church and the Market. The latter is far more readable, despite its considerably greater length, but I have to admit that I don’t get excited about reading anything on economics and often wind up resorting to whatever I’ve got on my iPod to entertain me on the way home.

With luck, and maybe more sleep, I’ll get through ‘em both.

(Otherwise, the joke may at least partially elude you):

(For the full-sized version, go here)

If you aren’t really Web 2.0 savvy, and haven’t a clue what social bookmarking is, in my opinion the best example is Digg.com.

I use Digg regularly, and often find a lot of interesting stories there that I would probably never find otherwise. The principle involved is quite simple - users submit stories, other users vote on them (or “digg” them) and as they receive votes, they go up in rank, finally making it to the front page of the site, where they tend to grow more rapidly in popularity. The idea is that the most interesting stories to the user community rise to the top.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and wondering if there’s a way to carve this out in such a way that it serves the online Catholic community. I’m concerned, however, that the community may be too small, the focus may be too niche, and that the interaction could be less than stellar.

Case in point: Pickafig.com, which came out roughly at the exact moment I was bouncing the idea off of a couple of people on whether it would be worth doing a Catholic version of Digg. My take? It’s not an attractive site - the layout is cluttered, the design is blah, and every story gets like one or two votes. It’s also really, really narrow in its focus. I love Catholic stuff. I read it, I write about it, but I want more than that. I want a comprehensive look at life through a lens that incorporates Catholicism, political conservatism, and the like, but doesn’t filter out humor, movies, music or whatever other topics I feel like talking about.

Is there a way to do it better than Pickafig? I think so, but I’m just not quite there yet. My feeling is that for social bookmarking to work, you need a heavy emphasis on the “social” part, which requires an appeal to a sufficiently large group of people.

Maybe making something like this explicitly Catholic is going too narrow. I just see a wide open gap for Catholic Media 2.0 - there are lots of opportunities to branch out, and they needn’t all be explicitly Catholic or preachy. They just need to be the kind of place where a pro-life story or an article about Mass don’t get buried because the teeming mass of users are all atheistic anti-Catholic doobie-lovin’ fools.

The Onion reports on an exciting product development:

After decades of coddling young children, Johnson & Johnson unveiled its new “Nothing But Tears” shampoo this week, an aggressive bath-time product the company says will help to prepare meek and fragile newborns for the real world.

A radical departure for the health goods manufacturer, the new shampoo features an all-alcohol-based formula, has never once been approved by leading dermatologists, and is as gentle on a baby’s skin as “having to grow up and fend for your g**damn self.”

“We at Johnson & Johnson have been making bath time a safe and soothing experience for far too long,” company CEO William C. Weldon said. “Years of pampering have left our newborns helpless, feeble, and ill-equipped for the arduous road ahead.”

“It’s time our children got the wake-up call that’s been coming to them,” Weldon continued. “It’s time they cried their precious little eyes out.”

Yes, there’s profanity,  but the concept was too funny not to link. (If it really offends you, may I suggest you buy a bottle for yourself?)

There are some headlines you just never expect to see. “Puerto Rico Corpse Kept Upright For 3-Day Wake” is one of them.

The story is weird enough on its own. The pictures, though, they elevate the thing to a whole ‘nother level of bizarre. I’m a big fan of the corpse’s neatly trimmed goatie, designer NY Yankees cap, and best of all, the quintessential Dolce and Gabbana specs. Choice.

My response to Mark Shea’s critique of angry trads is up at Inside Catholic. Let’s see if we can get more than 300 comments on this one…