When I started high school I let the music I listened to be one of the things that defined me. In the place that I roamed the halls for four years, your taste in music had a lot to do with where you were placed in the Darwinist Social Strata -- Although I learned years later, when I was senior, that it ended up not mattering where you stood in the beginning but where you stood at the end.

However, there is a phenomenon that happens during the ages of 13 - 15: a strange thing that I call the "Music Boom". It hits almost everyone. It happens when you try to leave what plays on your Mom's radio and find your own style of music instead of just sticking with Pop for the rest of your dull, dull life... AND IT'S REALLY NOTICEABLE. It shows in a number of layers you wear, or your makeup, or your shoes. And even the way you talk. (I still have trouble not calling my professors "Man" like I did everyone else. That adolescent habit was one that stuck for life.)

For some people it's metal. For some, it's alternative rock. For some, it's 80s Hair and Glam Rock bands.

For you it may have looked like this:

You went from this:

Attribution: www.theonion.com

To this:

Or this:

To this:

But for me it was.... nothing.

All my friends had fallen in love with bands like A Day to Remember, or rap artists, or emo bands, or whatever. But me? Nothing really happened. I had found rock as a 7-year-old boy with a KISS album, and then at 12 discovered Nirvana and 90s Alternative Rock. As far as I was concerned, if it wasn't rock ranging from the year 1953 to the year 2000 (the only real exception being the All American Rejects, but come on guys, everybody loves them), it wasn't for me.

Dear Reader, I don't want you to get the impression that I wasn't open minded with music.Or that the "Music Boom" didn't have an effect on my style -- I still don the tie-dye and headband bandanna every now and again in the summer. (For God's sake, one of my favorite bands is the Grateful Dead) I tried for over three years to like System of a Down. But it wasn't for me. I never got really into the same music as my friends. Their music made me sad, angry, and different. Why? Because even in a place that I felt more at home anywhere else -- the Theatre and Drama Class -- I still got those outcast feelings.

But as time went on, I realized that those were mostly phases that people went through. Whether we are proud of those times or not, they were experiences and when we hear those songs we used to listen to, it's nostalgic. So listen to the music on your old mp3 player today, and I'll bet you'll say, "I used to listen to THAT?"