There’s No Crying At Britney

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

Last night I made the nearly fatal mistake of going to see Britney Spears. I thought it would be fun to transport myself back to the late-90s and hear some fun Brit-Brit. You know, back before she went all crazy and shaved her head.

I was wrong. It wasn’t fun, however, that’s another blog.

What I am still confounded about this morning is the crying girl in the bathroom after the show. There weren’t any straight men there so it couldn’t have been guy drama. It certainly wasn’t because she was overcome with emotion after hearing Britney’s closing song, Till The World Ends (By the way, I just had to utilize Google to see what the name of the song was as it sounded like 75% of the others I heard.). Perhaps she was just very sad because she, much like me after my first Fleetwood Mac concert, had waited so long for this day and it was over, but I don’t think that was it either. My guess is that Nikki Minaj’s opening set gave her a headache, which had blossomed into a full-blown migraine by the end of the night and she was in pain. I hope she feels better today.

I am continuing to cry silently, weeping for the loss of three hours of my life and $16 which would have been better spent on Harry Potter.

It’s Not Always Noodle Salad

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

One of my favorite quotes from a movie comes from As Good As It Gets. I’ve always loved Jack Nicholson’s character, Melvin Udall, and his ability to break things down to an uncomfortably basic level. At one point in the movie Melvin, Simon and Carol are on a road trip to Baltimore as Simon is explaining his estrangement from his parents to his travel companions. Carol states that everybody has horrible stories to get over.

Since first seeing this movie on Valentine’s Day in 1998, I have heard Melvin’s reply when I hear people focusing on all the negative that has happened in their life.

It’s not true. Some people have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car. But, a lot of people, that’s their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you’re that pissed that so many others had it so good.

My life has certainly not always been good times and noodle salad, but the past couple of years I’ve been making a concentrated effort to have more noodle salad to make up for the times like I’m having now (not horrific, but not great). I try not to dwell on the negative and I don’t broadcast every bad thing that happens in my life. Everybody is going to go through hardships, some more so than others, but you can’t live in it and it’s definitely not doing anybody any good to focus on everybody who seems to have it better.

There will be adversity. You will be faced with uncertainty, hard decisions and heartbreak. You will be held accountable for your mistakes, people will hurt you and, believe it or not, whether you mean to or not, you will probably hurt other people. In the midst of all of this, try to remind yourself that there are good times and noodle salad to be had, even if you have to make them yourself.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

If you’re a girl who grew up in the 80s and haven’t seen this movie, you’ve been slighted in one of the worse possible ways. Girls Just Want To Have Fun (starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Helen Hunt and Shannen Doherty, among others) captivated me at the age of 9. The first time I saw it I was hooked. It was like the cleaned up, non-abortion Dirty Dancing for pre-teens. To this day, I watch it every time it comes on TV and I’m pretty sure the DVD is lurking somewhere in my house.

I remember watching it one night and being filled with a sense of melancholy. I walked out in the our back yard in Austin, Texas, sitting down on the folding lawn chair and crying. A few minutes later my mom was out there trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I told her I was sad because nothing that cool was ever going to happen to me in my entire life.

Twenty-two years later, I think I am destined for something even better. I’m just still waiting to see what that’s going to be.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun – Trailer

When Stars Collide

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

I’m fortunate to have experienced a few great loves in my short life. Some are inanimate and some are even intangible. One of these loves manages to fall under both categories. I love books. I love the way that stories can sweep me up and, for as much time as I can spare that day, I can go somewhere else and I am completely lost. One of my favorites is “The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When I first read of Nick Carraway’s time on Long Island Sound, I was adrift in the 1920s. Fitzgerald’s florid writing style allowed my imagination to run wild envisioning the extravagant parties that were so commonplace at the time. I always imagined myself in attendance wearing a simple dress, hairpin curls with an embellished headband and a strand of pearls that hung down to my waist. The perfect clutch would have completed my ensemble and I would have fit right in.

The perfect clutch, like my other accessories, should project relevance and sophistication, rather than flash and trends. I don’t take myself too seriously, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate great works and fantastic authors. That is why I am in love with Kate Spade‘s Book of the Month clutch. This clutch (it also comes in an adorable tote) is perfect for me and makes a definitive statement about my personality. Until it finds itself resting peacefully in my closet, it will rest peacefully on my wish list.

 

Baby Birthdays and Other Reasons You’re Oversharing

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

Each morning I get up, let my dog out and wander aimlessly into my kitchen to prepare whatever low-carb, lo-cal “breakfast” I believe I can force feed myself without incident. This morning as I was spooning cottage cheese out of the container I noticed a pastel green party invitation laying casually on the granite counter top. It was one of the customized, glossy photo invitations that everybody is using now for everything from bah mitzvahs to Christmas cards. The light green back ground was covered with floating daisies and, in the center there was a cockeyed picture of some stranger’s fat, redheaded, smiling baby.

The invitation encouraged the recipient to come and celebrate the life and happiness of Baby. All I wanted to celebrate when I looked at this picture was Baby getting into some clean clothes that hadn’t been covered in green puke (which I was later informed was Baby’s first taste of guacamole. Who puts that in a public photograph?).

I placed my breakfast back in the refrigerator, content that I was about 100 calories closer to a girlish figure than Baby due to my now non-existent appetite.

What happened to cute first year pictures? Was a matching outfit, or an appropriate photo really too much to ask? I would have settled for a photo sans a regurgitated lunch.

With the rise of digital photography, Facebook and photo sites like Flickr, we’re much more apt to take and share pictures of the mundane and sometimes even digestively offensive, but does that mean that it’s okay to send invitations to your loved ones for a birthday party, where, if the invite is any indication, I’m more likely to walk away having been puked on than I would at a Vanderbilt frat party?

This is just one more instance of over-sharing in today’s world. Just because you can put it out there doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

Faking It

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

This morning I came across Lindsay Ferrier’s blog post regarding the purchase of knockoff designer bags. I’ve expressed my stance on knockoff bags enough times that I felt compelled to comment on the subject. After writing four paragraphs , I realized I was writing a post of my own.

I’ve had knockoffs over the years. In the beginning they came by way of one of my step-father’s clients who would bring bags back from New York as gifts. I got my very first knockoff my sophomore year of high school. It was a hunter green “Phooney and Bourke” backpack purse. I didn’t really see the massive appeal of a D&B bag (all that tiny lettering is too busy for my taste), but everybody in high school was carrying one and my parents were offering it to me in the interest of fairness since my private schooled step-sisters apparently needed them as a uniform requirement. Given that I went to a public high school, I’m guessing 90% of the ones I saw everyday were fakes. The other 10% were likely lifted from the carrier’s mom’s closet as soon as she was out of the drive-way and on her way to work.

College and a meager, steady paycheck brought an appreciation for accessories. I fell in love with the simplicity of Kate Spade’s patterns and designs and my next knockoff, a blue on blue stripped “Fake Spade” Sam, was given to me. I loved it, but despite, and probably because of, the compliments I was given when I carried it, I felt like I was somehow cheating fashion. I had no idea where it had come from (other than eBay), but imagined some lady sitting in her house in Ohio, picking out similar fabrics to those of the authentic bags and hand sewing the telltale labels on the outside of the purses.

I purchased a few more knockoffs over the years. However, they were confined to pieces I liked, but couldn’t afford. After society decided to bring bell bottoms back, it became painfully clear that I couldn’t rely on the public-at-large to dictate my sense of style. Besides…in the absence of a reason to get dressed up, I’m very much a blue jeans and t-shirt kind of girl.

After Jessica Simpson sparked another Louis Vuitton craze in ’03 and ’04, I’d begun to grasp the scope of the industry and no longer imagined a suburban housewife, sewing the labels on the bags. What suburban housewife had access to leather working equipment? I knew the leather fakes were most likely out of the Orient and assumed the everything else was as well. I’d heard stories about poor working conditions and knew they were probably less than ideal; however, in my naiveté, I imagined a room full of Chinese workers, slaving over their sewing machines, making a pittance for a weekly salary, then heading home to their huts where they would gleefully eat their bowl of fish and rice, ecstatic to have work that paid anything at all. I stupidly assumed that this industry, a black market, would afford its overseas workers the same basic working conditions as the mainstream clothiers claim. Of course I felt a little guilty, but surely the Chinese government had labor laws just like the United States, and even if I thought their standards were sub par, it was the prerogative of the Chinese government to dictate what was acceptable for its citizens. I needed that Louis Vuitton Piano Bag that Jessica Simpson carried on Newlyweds.

In January, 2009, I came across a piece by Dana Thomas in Harper’s Bazaar, “The Fight Against Fakes”. The absolute horrors of this industry hit me head on. In the article Dana quotes a passage from her book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster:

“I remember walking into an assembly plant in Thailand a couple of years ago and seeing six or seven little children, all under 10 years old, sitting on the floor assembling counterfeit leather handbags,’ an investigator told me… ‘The owners had broken the children’s legs and tied the lower leg to the thigh so the bones wouldn’t mend. [They] did it because the children said they wanted to go outside and play.”

After reading this, I knew I would never again carry one of these bags in good conscience or otherwise. I couldn’t, and still don’t, understand how we can live in a world that allows human trafficking for the sake of carrying what APPEARS to be a designer bag. I don’t understand why people are allowed to die in the name of mining diamonds and those have some quantifiable value (even though it’s just a rock). But a purse? Are you really willing to condemn people to be beaten, starved and treated as subhuman just so your friends can think this bag, that you spend too much time searching through for car keys, cost you several hundred dollars? Since reading Dana’s piece, I have heard other stories; stories of children chained to sewing machines, sleeping on floors, starving, beaten and broken so their “owners”, for lack of a better phrase, can reap the rewards of their slave labor.

I recently went to New York for a long weekend with a friend.  Hell bent on shopping, she was adamant that we visit Chinatown and explore the secret shops and store rooms that make up the labyrinths behind the storefronts. I hadn’t ever been to Chinatown, but quickly became accustomed to the women and men standing in the doorways, quietly mumbling names like Coach, Tiffany and Juicy, hoping to catch our attention. At one such store they caught D’s. Quickly, they ushered inside the store where part of the wall began to give way to a doorway that would have been undetected by the casual observer. After entering the room, the door was immediately closed behind us and it was indicated that we were to follow a small woman who lead us down a hall, through another door, down a flight of stairs, across a musty basement, up another flight of stairs and into a small room where purses covered the walls. There were about six other women in there shopping when we entered. I remember thinking that taking out my phone would probably be seen as a hostile act and I wasn’t keen on being mistaken as an undercover anything. There were beautiful bags in that room. I was particularly taken with a few of them, but looking around at the bargain priced bags, belts, wallets and sunglasses, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all wrong. What I now knew of the production of these things had taken any joy I would have found in my previous state of blissful ignorance. I just wanted to leave.

I couldn’t begin to express my philosophical concerns to the two women who stood guard in the room with us. I wondered if they had children and if their children had come to the US with them…or were they some of the children working in the mills, essentially sold into the trade in exchange for passage to a better life. I have no idea to what extent these women knowingly participated as cogs in the wheel, but standing there, I knew that I would never perpetuate the need for these things again.

The Importance of Reaching Out

/ Lesley Rebecca / 4 Comments

I woke up Saturday morning, ready to take on the day as I halfheartedly prepared to report to a volunteer project I had agreed to work on a few months ago. It’s not that I didn’t want to do it, but my own life is hectic at the moment with all the things we let we let clutter our day-to-day existence. My boyfriend is coming into town next weekend and I’m in desperate need of spending some quality time with my house. I need to do laundry, shop for groceries, get some writing done, transfer old blog posts, catch up on my DVR… Nothing of earth shattering importance, but it all adds up to my life, nonetheless. I sipped my coffee while scrolling through pages of Google reader, Twitter feeds, emails and Facebook, mindlessly checking in on what everybody had been talking about since I had drifted off to sleep around midnight the night before. One incredibly short post altered my state of mind.

R.I.P. Saul Juliao

I met Saul (or Chris depending on his liking that year) in the 4th grade when we moved to Nashville from Austin. Through years of what I generally qualified as torment at the time, Saul had been an on again, off again confidant and cohort. I have few clear and vivid memories of high school and I am constantly reminded of events that I took part in, of which I have little or no memory. However, I have very vivid memories of Saul. One of my favorites involved us skipping out of class one afternoon and going to his house. We sat around and sang while he strummed along on his guitar. To this day, whenever I hear Let Her Cry by Hootie and the Blowfish I think of him.

Even as teenagers, I felt like Saul was a bit of a lost soul. He wasn’t a bad kid or particularly tormented. In fact, I remember his wide engaging smile and his laugh as much as I remember his resonating voice. Saul just seemed a bit disillusioned with everything, but maybe that’s what we had in common aside from the performance choirs and madrigals we both participated in. I transferred schools and years passed by, but I have thought of Saul fondly and often.

Since learning of Saul’s suicide I’ve also learned of the problems he’d had in recent years. Drugs and alcohol had a grip on him that he couldn’t shake. I’m still heartbroken for him in more ways than I can articulate. Initially I was consumed with sadness, imagining how he must have felt. I’ve been low before (and I’m sure more of us than will ever admit it have had the fleeting or not so fleeting thought that it would be easier if life just ended where we stood), but to feel so strongly that there’s no way out and your only recourse is to end your life… I don’t care how many years had passed, I would give anything to have bumped into him or gotten the out of nowhere phone call from him. I would have given anything to have had the opportunity to let him know that people cared for him more than he realized.

I went to the Designathon for Youth Turns on Saturday, my eyes red and puffy, feeling the tears well up in my eyes whenever I was alone for more than two minutes. Having something to do helped keep my mind off the tidal wave of sadness that threatened to overtake me. My involvement wasn’t life changing. I don’t really feel like I did anything of significance actually. I took pictures, tweeted until people were sick of hearing from me and rounded up a few news segments on our efforts to boost morale. Hopefully, what I did helped. I know the work Youth Turns is doing is important for a lot of other kids who feel alone and lost. They’re trying to reach out to children of incarcerated parents and letting them know they aren’t alone, and that there are people who care about them immensely. Thanks to the work they’re doing, these kids won’t be forgotten.

And thanks to some teenage rebellion and an affection for music, neither will Saul Christopher Juliao.

Please Shut Your Mouth, You Sound Like An Idiot

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

I am a peacekeeper by nature. I’m not a big fan of confrontation and the odds are pretty good that if I’ve said something to you that could be construed in the least to seem as though I were putting you in your place, I’m either extremely hurt or it’s not the first time you’ve done or said whatever it is that I disagree with (I’ve just bitten my tongue). I don’t discuss politics and religion with strangers and I’m never the one to bring it up with friends unless I know they agree with me. Since this is the behavior that my friends are used to, I feel the need to issue a bit of a warning. I have bitten my tongue as many times as I care to with regard to this issue.

If you are in my presence and decide to be the idiot that says anything to the effect of “I get that there was an earthquake, but why aren’t we helping the people in our OWN country,” I need you to be ready for the verbal lashing that will immediately follow. You probably won’t be able to hold your own, but it’s ok, I don’t expect you to. I expect that the kind of person who would utter such an uncompassionate, thoughtless, uneducated statement probably puts more thought into what kind of toilet paper to purchase than they do the words that come out of their mouth and thusly, isn’t going to have a rebuttal of any magnitude to anything I have to say. And to show what a nice person I am, I’m even going to give you a heads up on some of the talking points I’ve mulled over. Let’s break down the stupidity of your comment and I’ll try to simplify things for you.

  • Take a trip with me back to the early 1700s. Saint-Domingue (Haiti) was a French colony. The indigenous people from the island had already been enslaved and when the French needed more people to work on their sugar plantations they imported them from Africa. It was bad. By 1791 the slaves began a revolt that would last through 1803. On January 1, 1804, they declared their independence from French rule and the newly formed country (the only one born of slave revolt) became Haiti.
  • Since Napolean was dispossessed of such a money making colony, and he was looking at war with Britain, his plan for expansion in North America had to be retooled. He sold the Louisiana territory to the U.S. dirt cheap. Had the Haitian slaves not fought, or had they given up, a map of this country could very easily look vastly different today.
  • In exchange for France’s recognition of Haiti as a sovereign country, Haiti agreed to pay reparations to French slaveholders in the amount of $90 million francs. That debt was finally repaid in 1947. It took them over 100 years to repay that. They are an incredibly poor country.
  • As for what we’re doing for our “OWN” country, I must have failed to notice the natural disaster that has struck somewhere in Iowa, obliterating the infrastructure and leaving people buried alive as the government struggles to dig itself out of the rubble (literally). There are a lot of amazing people doing amazing work for people in the U.S. and to make a blanket statement like that fails to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of people that are so giving of their time, money, homes, talents and whatever else they have at their disposal. Just because it isn’t covered by CNN as part of a media frenzy doesn’t mean that people aren’t working to better the lives of their fellow Americans everyday. What have you done lately?
  • Lastly, I remind you of compassion. After the World Trade Center Towers fell many other nations stood poised to send rescue teams, supplies, equipment and whatever else they could to help New York City and the rest of the United States recover. It wasn’t because we couldn’t provide for ourselves or necessarily needed the help. I like to think it stemmed from a need for other countries to offer their condolences and express sympathies on a greater scale.

A wise Richard Gere once said, “What we all have in common is an appreciation of kindness and compassion; all the religions have this. We all lean towards love.” Beyond anything I can offer of historical or political value, I remind you that these are human beings. These are are individuals who have lost their entire families, some of whom, no doubt, sat next to leveled buildings for days listening to the cries of people trapped beneath the rubble wondering if the muffled, pleading voice they heard was that of a loved one or even their child. I cannot imagine hearing the pleas of those trapped, but I think even worse might be the horror that comes with the realization that it stopped.

Many of those that survived have sustained such serious injuries that their lives will be forever altered. That is, if they continue to survive the lack of available medical care. See, it’s not a matter of not having health insurance there. There are no hospitals. Doctors, medical staff and supplies are spread thin, resulting in triage care to deal with the most serious of injuries and hopes of merely stabilizing the injured, never mind managing their pain or treating the injury. Imagine laying outdoors for days in unsanitary conditions with your crushed legs and no pain medication. The smell of the dead is becoming ever more present and you haven’t seen anyone you know since the men who brought you here on the makeshift stretcher left. I can’t imagine that you’d be quick to turn help away because it was coming from a stranger.

These picture that I’ve painted seems hellish, which even seems a gross underestimation of what is going on in Haiti right now. However, I hope they’ve given you cause to stop and think about the absurdity of what has come out of your mouth in the last ten days.

You choose to look at the events transpiring before us cynically and see opportunities better offered to others. I look at the same events and it gives me hope, hope that in spite of everything tragic and horrible that this world has to offer, there is an abundance of good and beauty and love.

The outpouring you see is the world’s way of expressing grief and a desire to do something to benefit another man in time of need. This is why we help. This is why we give. This is why we do.

“We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology.”
-Ronald Reagan

“Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.”
-Hubert H. Humphrey

Be Kind, Rewind: Thanks for 2009

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

I don’t blog as much as some of you, or myself, would like, but given the retrospective nature this week I wanted to say something about the year before it passes me by completely. This isn’t one of my sarcastic, haha moments. It’s more like a giant, mushy, personally written Hallmark Card.

First let me say that I don’t really like the idea of a New Year’s “resolution”. If you want to go on a diet, go on a diet. If you want to quit cursing, quit cursing. The magical effect that the stroke of midnight has doesn’t effect your willpower. However, as fantastic as 2009 was, there are things I can do to make 2010 (and my life in general) even better for myself. For that reason I like the idea of setting goals for myself in the upcoming year. Nothing has to be obtained overnight and if I slip up a few times, I haven’t failed a resolution. We’re all works in progress.

  • Worry less about my text messages, emails, Facebook and cell phone in general when I am in the company of living, breathing people. Nothing tells somebody they’re lower on the totem pole faster than being ignored for an electronic device. Plus (even though I’m guilty of it), I just think it’s rude.
  • This includes “me” time that I’ve set aside to do things that I enjoy. I don’t have to spend every second of my day beholden to the mobile phone gods.
  • Endeavor to manage my time more wisely. It’s not as much fun to have fun when you’re constantly worried about everything you aren’t getting done.
  • Take up for myself more often.
  • Be a little more careful with my heart and a little more giving with my affection.
  • Take more silly pictures and take myself less seriously. It’s ok to be silly and get really excited about completely stupid things in front of friends. They should love me for my neurosis, not in spite of them.
  • Spend more time with friends playing games, laughing and talking and less time struggling to hear them in noisy bars.
  • Relax.
  • Hang out with my family more.

“Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as simple and as difficult as that” – Michael Leunig

This year has been nothing, if not full of the unexpected. So many seemingly innocuous moments led to such bigger events that I can’t even begin to recount them all in my head. I guess I could call it the year of the Butterfly Effect. I already know the year has brought more happy than hurt, more laughter than tears and I hope in time I will see that it brought more beginnings than endings.

I’ve been able to make a lot of really fantastic memories this year and even though the endings to some of the stories aren’t what I had hoped, the stories themselves brought me some of my happiest moments from the year and without some of the sad, I wouldn’t have had some of the really, really, ridiculously happy. In time I’ll see where even the darkest moments were leading. I’ve been blessed to spend time and reconnect with old friends whom I love more than they will ever realize. Most of these people don’t realize the impact they made on me more than a decade ago, but I hope in another ten years I’ll be able to explain it to them more articulately. I’ve made new friends out of old friends and in some cases, even made their friends my own. Whether you know it or not, every once of you has had a part in making this an amazingly great year for me. To quote Mr. Sinatra, “It’s been a very good year for city girls who lived up the stair with the perfumed hair.” Here’s to hoping it doesn’t all come undone when I’m thirty-one.

I love you all.
Happy New Year!

The Grace of a Woman

/ Lesley Rebecca / Leave a comment

Ten years ago I realized I was in love with my best friend. The guy I hung out with, talked to every night on the phone and who also had a girlfriend who was moving to Nashville from Atlanta to be with him. I had avoided the thought of getting involved with him because I was young and couldn’t imagine being in a serious relationship with anybody. I loved the relationship I had with him and didn’t want it to change, but with the impending arrival of his girlfriend I was forced to contemplate a world where that relationship was going to change drastically and not in a good way. What followed was three months of heartbreak and turmoil, the likes of which I hadn’t yet witnessed in my young life. I cried, obsessed and generally subjected myself to daily torture. It was incredibly masochistic of me. Eventually he broke things off with her and all was right with the world. Five years later when that relationship ended I remember thinking that I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I didn’t know if I wanted to. Who wants to imagine a world without the person you love the most?

Fast forward ten years and in the last few weeks I’ve come to realize I have feelings for one of my close friends, but this time I see the signs. We have such a great relationship as it is, that I’ve always pushed thoughts of anything further happening out of my mind. I don’t need a serious relationship right now. The only problem is that I think he’s about as close to the idea of my perfect guy as actually exists.
A few weeks ago we were hanging out and suddenly the vibe felt a little different. In the few weeks that have passed we’ve had to have conversations about us and what we both want. First, and foremost, we want to preserve what we have. Second, I think we both have a lot to think about. I’m unsure about being in a serious relationship, but know that I can’t handle being involved with him in the least and him continuing to date other people. He’s made the comment that he’s fairly sure I’m the one and he’s having a hard time wrapping his head around it. We’re going to sit on it for a while and continue on like normal for the time being and I’m going to push those thoughts back to the recesses of my mind.
Ten years ago this would have been turmoil. It would have meant me crying, wanting to talk about it with him constantly and subjecting myself to torture. A little life experience and having a feeling that he might actually be “the one” (even though I haven’t admitted that to anybody) is letting me sit back and enjoy this for what it is, two adults who want to be deliberate with their actions, who don’t want to hurt or lose the other one and want to make sure they’re ready for what we both foresee as a commitment.
I’m not posting cryptic messages as my Facebook status or cyber-stalking anybody this time. I’m not pushing him or me. I’m sitting back and enjoying the occasional nights I get to spend sleeping with my head on his shoulder.