Somebody That I Used to Know

Gotye.
This is a kind of weird song, but it has grown on me (as the radio stations keep playing it over and over). I actually heard the WotE cover before I heard the real song. "Somebody That I Used to Know" is a chill song, but it was in listening to a lyrics version of the video for this post that I really got an idea of what the second half of the song is about.
Gotye starts the song off, and it's a melancholy post-break-up song (not my favorite kind). It seems pretty straightforward that they were in love, she ended it, and that was that. Things were over and each went their separate ways. He sings of how she's "just somebody that I used to know."
All of a sudden, Kimbra starts singing and it changes the perspective on the situation totally. She takes his words and changes them just a little bit. She tells us that

"You said that you could let it go,

and I wouldn't catch you caught up on 

somebody that you used to know"

Just like that, she goes from being a bit heartless and mean in the way she ended the relationship to vindicated in her reaction to his inability to move past somebody that he used to know. I'd never really noticed that switch listening to the song before, but I think it really makes the song a whole lot more interesting.

I remember reading a short story once (I can't find it online right now though) about two children fighting in class. The teacher took them aside and asked what the problem was and it became apparent that there was a misunderstanding, but that neither was willing to see the other's perspective. The teacher took them over to her desk and had them sit on opposite sides of it. She took a ball out her desk, placed it on the center of the table and asked them to describe it. The first described the ball as about 3 inches across, shiny and black. The second immediately jumped in to contradict the first and point out that the ball was white. It quickly escalated to the point that it looked like they would attack each other across the teacher's desk.

The teacher got control of the two and had them switch sides whereupon they noticed that the ball was colored perfectly white on one side and black on the other.

It's a pretty simple example of how different people see the same thing very differently, and I can't tell you how many times this story has come back to me as I've realized that I was standing somewhere, insisting that the ball had to be white and nothing else.

Some of the saddest occurrences I can think of resulted from misunderstandings. May Gotye serve as a reminder (as it plays every half hour on the radio) that there is a second side to every coin, and another perspective for every story.