The other day, my friend Flamechild* and I analyzed each other’s lunches. She said that my container of rice and black beans represented the contents of a dumpster. I said that her bagel revealed her fear of 90-degree angles. Then she said I have a crush on a dumpster.Flamechild and I don’t know anything about lunch analysis. We made that s*** up. But as we sat there, snorting so loudly at our own jokes that the people around us began backing away, I started thinking about all the literary analyses I’ve written since coming to Garfield.

Learning to analyze literature is the point of Language Arts classes at Garfield, and analyzing literature usually requires interpreting symbols. Unfortunately, to interpret a symbol, one must first identify the symbol. Even more unfortunately, any living thing or inanimate object can be a symbol for something else, without any particularly good reason.

Over the past four years, teachers have explained that the ashes near East Egg represent poor people, that Yorick’s skull represents the inevitability of death, and that Janie’s hair represents sexuality. Everything else represents Britain.

I want to believe my teachers, I really do. But I stopped trusting authority figures when my doctor started using phrases like, “I think there’s a 50 percent chance it’s probably just a lymph node.”

Most of the time, I only see the symbolism in a book after hearing the explanation. Maybe I’m symbolically challenged — or maybe the symbolism isn’t actually there. Fitzgerald might have written about the ashes in The Great Gatsby because he liked the color gray. Shakespeare might have written about Yorick’s skull because he wanted Hamlet to be even more gruesome. Zora Neale Hurston might have focused on Janie’s hair because she liked hair.

I make arbitrary choices every day; I slap someone or sit on the floor because I feel like it. Authors must make arbitrary choices, too, and nobody else can know for sure if a symbol is a symbol. It could be just a lucky but meaningless accident of choice.

I have Ms. Harris for AP LA this year. Sometime around the beginning of September, she told my class that her high school LA teacher said all of the dashes in Emily Dickinson’s poetry were phallic symbols; he insisted they revealed her repressed sexuality. Although Dickinson was a hermit and probably didn’t get much action, Ms. Harris disagrees with that interpretation. But if two language arts teachers disagree on a poem’s symbolism, which teacher should students trust?

If Dickinson, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Hurston, and all their author peers weren’t dead, students could ask them about the symbols in their books. But they are dead, and Ouija boards don’t work very well for multi-clause questions.

I have an equally hard time understanding symbolism in art. Art has meaning because the artist says it has meaning, and people buy art when they believe in that meaning. I felt confused when a video of a naked woman hitting a punching bag made it into the Henry Art Gallery, while my sculpture, “Trash From Parking Lot Piled into Plastic Container — 2001,” did not. Either the punching bag represented something, or people believed the artist when she said that it did. When I said that the trash in the plastic container symbolized the worn, ragged citizens of a city devoid of nature, nobody could prove me wrong. Yet because I had little artistic authority back in 2001, nobody believed in my symbols.

So, something is a symbol because an authority figure says it’s a symbol. That’s like how I have to do chores because my mom and dad say I have to do chores.

Since Flamechild and I invented lunch analysis, we are naturally the figures with the most authority in the field. If she says that a container of rice and beans represents a dumpster, she must be right.