According to Gatsby's Nick Carraway, "Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply."

I read that sentence when I was lying on the couch last night, listening to Tom try to prod Paul into waking up and doing his math homework. And I thought, "I'd like to come up with a pithy retort"; but in truth when confronted with such epigrams, I tend to blink hard and become speechless. I don't hold anything against the character for saying this; I don't hold anything against Fitzgerald for writing it. What I do is start asking myself, "Is he right?" and then saying no and then saying maybe and then sighing and looking out the window into the dusk and wishing I was a better human being than I am.

Sometimes when I think of my response to such a statement, I'm amazed that I've managed to do anything at all with my life--that any woman has managed to do anything at all with her life--that any person has managed to do anything with his or her life. It's so simple to be cowed; it's so simple to be nothing. It's so simple to take a plain declarative sentence to heart, to believe that it was invented to subdue all your seeping flaws and confiding, arrogant desires. Literature never gets any easier to take.

Ah. Time to change the subject, I see. So I'll move on to Winter's Tale news. I'm very close to ignoring Paul and continuing into the scene without him. Tom and I cannot seem to keep this child awake. Maybe he's having a growth spurt, or maybe he's got narcolepsy; but every day after school he comes home and falls asleep on the couch. Then, when woken, he mutates into a scowling zombie, and reading Shakespeare with a scowling zombie is not at all fun or instructive.