Analyze this

The radio at work is set to Sirius Radio's Coffeehouse station; it's self-described as "acoustic reinterpretations from your favorite singer-songwriters" and while there is a lot of repetition when you listen to it for forty hours a week, it is generally a pleasurable listening experience. So Dave Matthews was on the radio before playing an acoustic version of "Grace is Gone," and the song was prefaced by Dave talking about how the song was written either for or about his stepfather . . . I was helping a customer at the same time so I didn't catch exactly what was said . . . anyways, it piqued my interest. In ninth grade, we read "Romeo and Juliet" in my English class and had to do a project in which we made a soundtrack to the play, choosing songs whose lyrics we felt described the play and its characters, scenes, etc. Well, ninth grade marked my discovery and subsequnt obsession with Dave Matthews Band, and one of the songs I chose to include on the soundtrack was "Grace is Gone." I was so convinced that this song was written about Romeo drinking the poison; I could justify every line's connection to the play and have it make perfect sense. Apparently not! My ninth-grade self would've been very disappointed to hear it.

Anyways, it's just another classic example of how anything can be twisted to mean what you want it to mean. How many times have we each listened to a song and thought we'd found our personal anthems? Read something and been convinced it was written expressly for ourselves?

Interpretation is so gray, which is at once a wonderful and a terrible thing. Too often I find myself reading into situations and interpreting the "he said, she saids" with ridiculous scrutiny, always seeming to forget that my take is usually radically different than someone else's. My sincerest condolences to fellow English majors suffering from that same inability to separate literature from life.