I beared witness to something Saturday night that made me ask myself, “Is it mean to hold up your hand and say ‘High Five’ to a midg…er dwar….er little person?”

I got bored the other day and wondered “How would The Great Gatsby read like a text message?”

This is as far as I got

chptr 1
In my yngr and more vlnrbl yrs my fathr gave me some advice that I’ve been trning ovr in my mind evr since.
“Whnevr u feel like criticizing any 1,” he told me, “just remembr that all the ppl in this wrld haven’t had the advantages that u’ve had.”
He didn’t say any mre, but we’ve alwys been unusually communicativ in a rsrvd way, and I undrstd that he ment a gr8 deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclnd to resrve all jdgmnts, a habit that has opend up many curious natures to me and also made me the victm of not a few vetrn bores. The abnrml mind is quik to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a nrml person, & so it came about that in college I was unjstly accused of being a politician, b/c I was privy 2 the secrt griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—freqntly I hve feignd sleep, preoccupat’n, or a hostile levity whn I realizd by some unmistakabl sign tht an ntimate revelat’n was quivring on the horizn; for the ntimate revelat’ns of yng men, or at least the trms in whch they xpress thm, r usually plagiaristic & marrd by obvious suppressions. Rsrving jdgmnts is a mattr of infinite hope. I am still a ltl afraid of missing sumthng if I forget that, as my fathr snobbishly suggestd, & I snobbishly rpt, a sense of the fundmntl decencies is parcelld out un=ly at brth.

Sometimes I really miss this stuff