The beauty of subjectivity...

So often in this world, we are told that we need to "remain objective", and to "keep things in perspective", and that we need to do so in order to be "fair". While this is truly very useful advice for many, many of the situations that we face in our lives, I have recently been made aware that subjectivity ought not to be viewed as such a bad thing, after all.

Several years ago one of my Grandfathers died. I was 20, and prior to this, the only time in my life I had dealt with death had been when my childhood dog had been put to sleep due to old age. That was tough, to be sure, but nothing compared to losing a grandparent.

As a musician, I've always had a very emotional connection to the music that I love, and right around this time I had bought the Blur album "13", and at the time, I was unaware of the back-story that influenced much of the songs on the album. I just thought the music was great, and that I'd get around to picking apart the lyrics later. After my Grandfather died, one day I was driving home from my girlfriends house, and I popped this album into my CD player, and the lyrics for the first song on the album, called "Tender", all of a sudden just jumped out at me. It was a very pretty song about losing someone and moving on. Hearing the lines "Come on, come on, come on, love's the greatest thing that we have, I'm waiting for that feeling, waiting for that feeling, waiting for that feeling to pass" just tore my heart out in that moment. It spoke perfectly to the situation I was in, and for the next month or two, I listened to the song whenever I felt the weight of his death on my shoulders. That song helped me through what was a very tough time in my life, and provided a perfect way for me to "just let it out".

About a year ago, I was talking to my roommate about the song, and I mentioned the lyrics: "I'm waiting for that feeling, waiting for that feeling, waiting for that feeling to pass", to which he gave me a very puzzled look, and said, "those aren't the lyrics". I responded with my own look of puzzlement, and he explained that the line was "waiting for that feeling to COME", not "pass". I said "are you sure?", and he assured me that he was, so I went into my room, fired up my MP3 player, and listened to the song. He was right. All this time I had been singing the lyrics incorrectly, and I wondered how I could possibly have confused the two words, since, aside from having the same number

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