Steve Skojec

I’ve become confident enough in Wordpress’s spam filter to turn comment moderation off. As long as you’re not posting lots of links to natural male enhancements or other sites of ill repute, your comments should go up without delay.

This is news primarily to new commenters, as the filter had built in recognition for those I’ve approved before.

Best Regards,

The Management

Yeah. You know you’ve wondered. Here I’ve assailed you with an image of my large, unshapely noggin in the header image and to top it off, I’m wearing headphones. Ugly headphones. (For the record, they’re Koss PortaPros, and despite the eighties-era design they have excellent sound quality for a pair of folding portables.)

The reason I used that particular picture is because I have so few decent photos of myself, and in that one I happened to be on a walk and listening to my eclectic album of the day (it was Imogen Heap, that day, as I recall). The fact is that I’m the camera guy in this house, and that means the lens is always facing away from me. When someone does manage to snap a picture, I’m usually wandering around with a case of bedhead and a beer or something, making those entirely unusable for propagating any kind of chic, cool, writerly appearance. I can’t have people knowing what a slob I really am.

As is my usual habit, I’m kicking around some ideas on doing a bit of redesign here. Since I dropped the exclusively Catholic theme from the blog, I’ve struggled to come up with a strong replacement. In time, the headphone picture will probably give way to either a better shot or none at all.

I’m sure you were all just dying to know. Now you do.

I’m not really sure how you managed to find my site through your perverse search terms. Because I blog on family life and social depravity, I suppose I have the keyword recipe you’re looking for. But let me take this opportunity to assure you, scumbags, you won’t find any “how to” guides on child sexual abuse here.

If I could find your IP address, I’d report you to someone, but my blog stats aren’t that sophisticated. So I just want to tell you that I despise what you’re doing, and for bringing that filth here. I hope that God has mercy on your soul, that you can get help, and that you will stop victimizing little children immediately.

That said, you’re lucky as hell I don’t know who you are. God is more merciful than I am.

To those of you who have had comments caught in my spam filter until today…my router died on Friday and I’ve been out of internet commission. I didn’t realize the comments were being filtered.

It has been remedied.

That’s what I have. It’s about as fun as it sounds:

Recurrent corneal erosion is a condition affecting the outermost layer of corneal cells called the epithelium. The problem is caused when the bottom layer of epithelial cells adhere poorly to the cornea, causing them to slough off easily. The pain and discomfort is often quite intense, and similar to a corneal abrasion. There is usually an underlying disorder that causes recurrent corneal erosions to occur. The most common are: previous corneal injury (corneal abrasion), corneal dystrophy (Map Dot Fingerprint Dystrophy), or corneal disease resulting in recurrent breakdown of the epithelial cells.

Upon awakening, patients often experience severe pain, blurred vision, and light sensitivity when the eyelid pulls the loosened epithelial cells off the cornea. After the cornea heals, the problem recurs as the name implies unless the condition is treated.

As you may recall, Sophie poked me in the eye with her fingernail back at the beginning of October. As I said at the time, it was the most painful injury I’ve ever experienced. The thing of it is, it never really healed properly. Often times, at night, I’d wake up (usually due to a crying child) and feel like the skin on my eye was ripping as I opened my eyes. This was, as you might imagine, tremendously painful, but I just figured I had to suffer with it until it finally stopped.

This past weekend, it got worse. Bad enough that I had to pull over on the way to Church and let Jamie drive. Monday was OK, but Monday night in the middle of the night, I woke up in excruciating pain. Something had happened in my sleep, and I was done.

The good news is that I switched doctors, and the new one is great. I’m on new medication that’s working already, and he’s explained to me what’s happening and what I need to do in a way that the last doctor didn’t. This morning was rough, but in the past few hours things have improved tremendously, enough that I can open both eyes and type this.

The moral of the story is that if you have children, be sure to wear safety goggles at all times.

I’ve added a link, with shopping days left until Christmas, to a personalized Amazon store. While my wishlist appears to be linked to this that’s not what this is about.

These are my recommendations - books, movies, music, toys, games - you name it. If it’s of any use to you and you find something you like, please purchase something through the store. They’ll kick back a measley little commission to me that’s certainly better than nothing.

The link is on the sidebar, but you can also see it here.

Sometimes, life is extremely depressing. As a blogger, it can be a rut I fall into too easily. Announcing the unexpected death of someone close to me has only made me realize even more that things here haven’t exactly been a joy parade.

This blog was, according to my original intention, supposed to be reborn as a general interest blog.  Instead, I’ve become some sort of accidental pundit - which is actually not a bad name for a blog, come to think of it. The fact is, politics and world affairs continue to dominate my attention these days as I’ve moved beyond the narrow focus of the old blog, which was more finely honed on the problems within the Catholic Church.

This shift in emphasis is not, entirely, a problem. I’m happy to follow a theme wherever it takes me, and if this is where I go, so be it.

But I need to lighten the mood here a bit, so I’m declaring today to be Politics-free Friday!

Today, anything I post will be quirky, interesting or fun. No Iran. No Iraq. No deconstruction of the conservative movement. I will resist all temptations toward doom and gloom.

Only good times.

Wow. My cornea has almost completely grown back. It’s a miracle. I still can’t read any fonts smaller than size 12 and everything through my right eye looks like that weird film technique they always use on Barbara Streisand (vaseline on the lens?) but the pain has almost completely subsided, which is good, and I’m back at work.

Oooh, there’s a breaking news alert about Anna Nicole Smith on MSNBC right now. Gotta go.

Over the past four years, many have gotten to know me as a traditional Catholic blogger. I’ve written, often in a polemical style, on the various topics of concern to tradition-loving Catholics in the modern world.

On September 15th, I hung up my gloves for good as an independent Catholic blogger, out there fighting the good fight for the restoration of liturgy, tradition, and orthodoxy in the Church. These topics are still dear to my heart, but I feel as though I’ve said nearly all of what I have to say about them in this medium.

My Catholicism is and always has been at the core of my identity, and it will continue to be so. And yet, there is more to me than that. I’m a writer. I’m an artist. I’m the funny guy in the back of class who made you fail biology.

I want to talk about other things. I’m going to let the pope be the pope for a while and I’ll just be Steve.

If you’re one of my old readers, you’re welcome to stick around, but don’t expect things to be the same. I’ll hit on topics I would have covered in the past, but not as often, and likely not in the same way. I’m sure I’ll be talking politics more as this presidential race heats up and our shoot-first-and-sort-it-out-later foreign policy drags on.

Expect the tone to be more irreverent, the posts to be pithy, and the frequency of content to be lighter. This is about the real Steve, the guy who lives in a paradoxical state between countercultural religious conservative and trendwatching gadget-freak who enjoys living in the crazy glow of the nation’s capitol, and all that goes with it.

I can’t predict where things will go, because I don’t have a map. I hope that in the course of things we’ll all find something here that’s worthwhile.