Stupid Fat Hobbit

Today is the day! After nearly a year of either complete separation or intermittent cohabitation, today June 25, 2009 Mrs. Hobbit arrives at our new hobbit hole and the hobbit’s will be whole again for the foreseeable future. For those of you who have never been forcibly separated from someone you love for an extended period of time, you need to read my blog on empathy! But for any of you that have, you know how special this day is. This is the day when I no longer have to say goodbye knowing that it will be between 3 weeks and 6 months before I get to say hello again. This is the night when I can go to sleep NOT HOLDING my pillow pretending…This is the day when the kids learn that both authority figures are back on the job and straightening up would be a very smart thing to do right about now!

Then there are the rest of the benefits. communication is face to face, not e-mail, not blogs, not texting, not cell phone but real honest-to-God, look her in the eyes and know what she’s thinking communication. To go out to a restaurant and not have to text and ask her what she’s having just because I want to know…There are so many things about this day that are special to me and I just want to the world to know that I love my wife and I could not be happier than to tell you all that this day will make the Top 10 list of days in my life because today, I don’t have to say goodbye again.

First, let me say Happy Father’s Day to all the dad’s out there. You (we) truly deserve some credit for being dude’s in a world where being a dude is not so cool anymore…When my father was younger, being ‘the man of the house’ was important and carried with it a lot of weight and responsibility. Being his youngest son (and his being an older father), I was raised with a different set of values than most of my peers. Something happened in the 60′s and 70′s to change the nature of fatherhood completely. I don’t know if it was Vietnam, Woodstock, Feminism, the killing of God, or what but certainly my fathers’ way of raising kids and being a man quickly went by the wayside in popular culture. And there were so many things about his way that were great! Men stayed with their families through thick and thin. They earned the money and their wives raised the children from home. More than once I heard the phrase “wait till your father gets home” and that truly meant something to me (I had messed up and dad was going to set me straight).

Today, our kids don’t respect their parents the way we used to. I didn’t fear my father but I certainly respected his authority. My kids don’t have that same sense of respect for me and I used to believe that I’d failed in raising them but I’m not sure that’s correct. I can tell because my oldest child thinks that the youngest child should respect him as her elder. Obviously, the lesson to respect your elders has penetrated but the application is self-centered rather than centered on others. Maybe that’s the difference in the generations. The last couple of generations don’t really care about anything outside of their own little world. Somehow we’ve become a world where our ‘fellow man’ does not extend beyond the realm of those we know or who we can benefit from. So this Father’s Day I’m asking you to think about how well you empathize with others. Empathy is almost foreign to the current generation. The ability to put ourselves in anothers’ shoes not to walk a mile in them but to feel what the other person is feeling and just to understand. We’ve removed that in our goal-oriented society where we need to know what we will gain from doing something and if that gain takes longer than a day, it’s just not worth it.

So, starting today, let’s take a moment to understand someone else. Someone who we don’t stand to gain from in our understanding. Maybe it’s our Pastor whose message today doesn’t fit well with our definition of God. Maybe it’s the waitress who appears to be distracted or rude. Maybe it’s the teenager covered in tattoo’s with 75-80 piercings who would normally receive your scorn. Every one of these people (and everyone else that we meet) have a story and a need. So many times we want to fix that need when really they just want someone to listen and understand, without judgment, without trying to fix it (which is a form of judgment), but with empathy…

Okay, so maybe I have a couple of readers who didn’t hear about me from June Cleaver (I think my wife reads this and I’m pretty sure she didn’t click the link from June’s blog, pretty sure) but the fact of the matter is that most of us owe our blogs to the fact that June inspired us to take what’s in our heads and send it out to the whole freakin’ world via a keyboard.

So recently June’s M.O. has been to post ‘swoon’ pictures every Monday for all the ladies (and disturbingly, a couple of the guys) to goggle at and then comment on how sexy the men are and how much they’d like to spend a couple of hours locked in a basement with a bottle of Olive Oil, some Peanut Butter, Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup, and some ice cubes with them. Okay, so I made that part up but I bet it would be fun! Anyway, the Hobbit doesn’t really spend much time on June’s Monday blogs; I read through them, make some snide remark and then go wash my fingertips before all the drool from her female followers dries on them. Many times I’ve thought to post my own swoon-worthy list of people whom I thought deserved to a little attention even though they may not be thought of in the ‘normal’ swoon sense. So today I sat down to post the first ever Hobbit Swoon List.. And this is as far as I got! I’d never really thought that creating a swoon list would be that difficult, you just make a list of the people you find attractive, Google them to find pictures (or have your adoring fans e-mail them to you) and then write snappy little phrases under the pictures! Voila, swoonness! Unfortunately, I could only think of one person that I’d like to be with right now and though it sounds a little bit self-serving, I’m not going to post 16 pictures of my wife for you all to eyeball. I’ve already posted one of her this week which is probably more than she wanted posted this year…

I even drank a couple of glasses of wine just to see if that would bring any other thoughts to me about swoonishness and all that that entails but unfortunately, that just caused me to have to delay posting this message for 30 minutes while I went and took a cold shower. Same person, different thoughts…No, I won’t share them with you! How dare you! Where was I? Oh yeah, swoonishness.

So now my thoughts have wandered to the origin of why we desire to see the opposite sex (for us normal folks, Warren) partially naked and why we don’t appreciate those who have opted to spend their time exercising things besides their muscles in the pursuit of a goal. Why for instance, don’t we post pictures of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mother Theresa when we’re discussing the people that deserve our attention. I mean sure Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman can turn our heads but really shouldn’t we spend some time focusing on the people who turn our minds as well? I mean, when was the last time you said, ‘oh man, I sure would like to see Madeline Albright in a string bikini!’ yet you can’t argue that the woman who was the first Female US Secretary of State wasn’t important to the world. I bet most of us have never heard the name Konrad Zuse and I promise you, you won’t find any commentaries about how he never used deodorant or what his favorite hair gel is but none of us would be spending hours mindlessly reading blogs if he hadn’t invented the first programmable computer.

‘What’s my point?’ you might ask. Well, I don’t have one; isn’t that why they call this a blog? It’s just me putting an opinion out there for anyone who wants to waste a little time and (hopefully) leave a comment on. You’re more than welcome to visit June and get a little jolly from watching the half-naked men do what they do best. I don’t envy you that. If I had their bodies, I might post a picture of myself (oh, shut up) and see what you think of it. Unfortunately for me, I’m shaped more like Buddha than Zeus so you’ll just have to deal with the fact that I exercise your mind and June exercises your ‘id’ (see Sigmund Freud if you need to know what I’m talking about). Speaking of Sigmund, you don’t see many pictures of him in the shower either, do you? I did find this sexy little number out on Google though. He’s no Edward Cullen but then again, who is?

All of my friends have issues. If they don’t have issues before they meet me, they certainly develop them shortly afterwords. I think I might be a carrier but I’m scared to discuss it with them in case they decide I am a carrier and stop being my friends.

Anyway, some very good friends here in San Antonio recently went through a very tough time as a couple. They split up for almost a year but they are now back together and seem to be happier than they have been in years. They’ve been having me over every once in a while since they know I’m alone and lonely (plus I watch their house for them when they go out of town) and we finally broached the subject of the catalyst for their separation and subsequent renewal. We didn’t get too deep but the husband started talking about this book he’d read (or actually listened to on CD) while temporarily single that brought a lot of things into focus for him. He realized that he and his wife had extremely different temperaments and that if they just understood each other a little better, they would be able to return to the joy they once knew. The book is called Personality Plus by Florence Littauer and like ‘The Five Love Languages’ it’s designed to put relationships into terms that are easy to understand and easy to work with. It’s not a college psychology course that only those with 10 lb brains can follow. It’s simple, direct, and very helpful. I highly recommend it if you are having difficulty getting along with anyone and just feel like you don’t understand them at all.