I'm sorry sweetheart, I can't be the man I led you to believe that I would be.

Jessica and I have just about finished our first lesson plan (which is really just a mock-up of a lesson plan), but its still an exciting "first" and if I may be so bold, a pretty cool assignment. Basically, we had to come up with a lesson that sends students to the web for research in order to meet certain National Educational Technology Standards (NETS). So, we've tasked our imaginary students with creating an "art gallery" by finding art samples online that they feel relate to a number of quotes from The Great Gatsby in order to create visual connections with the themes of the novel. Rather than us telling the students what to think, it allows them to create their own meanings in a way that is personally significant. As I was looking for decent quotes to use, I found something that is personally significant to me:

"He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was"

I feel like I've mostly been in the same sort of place for a long while now; like I've given away something that can't be returned or recovered and I'm still trying to gauge the significance of what's been lost. Hopefully the fact that Jay Gatsby is shot to death by the novel's end doesn't have any implications for me, although the literary nerd in me finds it tragically appropriate. This weekend pretty much confirmed that there are no easy answers and maybe no answers at all. The problem is, I'm not content with "I don't know."