In college, music takes on a whole different meaning. Uninhibited by the older neighbors we may have had living with our parents, music takes it full and proper shape on the university campus.

Everywhere you walk, you hear music playing, in every dorm and even on every street corner. If you walk into any room at Harvard and you don't find a stereo, which is playing, it's a miracle.

In college, music becomes an essential aspect of our lives, one that is fearfully influential, one that follows us wherever we go.

When we come home and we retreat to our bedrooms after saying a short "hello" to the parents, we don't necessarily run into our closets and find that old tuba and play it while dad sings a nursery rhyme along with us. Instead, we usually run into our backpacks, where can find the convenient walk- man and drain our parents' complaints away with the distorted sounds of Pearl Jam.

Music has become everything for this generation.

Not only is the strong history of music valuable and under appreciated, but so is the fact that music has become more than just an escape from our parents, roommates and our homework. It has also taken on much more meaningful proportions in our memories.

All of us have a favorite song. Some of us have more than just one. There is the favorite song to hear when you want to remember home and your friends, or your first kiss, your latest kiss, your loved one or even your parents. There are also songs that help you forget your parents, your friends or your loved one.

Then three are the songs that drown out your roommate in that next room. Of course there are also the party songs with which everyone seems to unite. Songs and music in general have come to acquire special meaning in our lives.

Maybe music wasn't the best thing to be grateful for at a Thanksgiving dinner where all your respectable family members age 50 and over are gathered. Maybe I should have stuck with saying that my family and the opportunity to go to a school like Harvard meant everything to me and never gone beyond that. But I would have cheated myself out of my true feelings.

I am grateful for my family. I am grateful for the opportunity to go to Harvard. But every year we say that in such generic terms that it sounds like we don't even believe it anymore.

Saying grace and the whole belief behind Thanksgiving has become minor and insignificant in comparison to some cranberry sauce and a big bird. We have to say grace, so we say it, in the simplest form, and immediately head straight for the food.

Last Thursday, I thought that I would at least try to bring back some type of honorable Thanksgiving tradition. But it was nagged by another, more moderns, Thanks giving tradition: forgetting what is really important in life and just heading for the "grub."