Perception: the lens through which we see our world

“A book is simply words on a page. The interpretation of those words occurs approximately halfway between the reader and the page. That is why interpretation is so personal. Everyone is a unique individual and applies their own views and life experiences to those words and can read the same words to mean something very different from another reader.”

It is not a verbatim quote, but it is close enough to what my grade 10 English teacher Mrs. Boddard was trying to impress upon us. It has very real applications to our world. For example: the 5.5 hour exam (yep, five and a half hours of sitting on my duff trying to pull more and more equations from my a**) I wrote yesterday. I knew before the exam that we were all going to get smoked as did the rest of my class.
“I brought two jars of Vaseline for the repeated rapings this exam is going to give me” exclaimed a classmate. After the exam, one girl was shocked at the calm manner in which another colleague and myself were packing up our bags in preparation for departure to the outer world.
“I just got anally raped and am about to go jump off of a bridge and you two must have done well since you’re so calm right now” she said.
I replied “I got bent over as well, but I knew that we were all going to get bent over. The only thing that matters is whether your chin came closer to your knees than your classmates’. That’s who we’re benched against.”

Same situation, radically different interpretation. Conclusion: I am used to getting anally raped by exams.