I Used To Be A Korn Kid
Megan Wood

This is me. Short hair, sweaters, chucks; Salinger and The Promise Ring rule my life. Amazingly enough, I wasn't always the emo kid I am today. In fact I used to be quite the opposite. I used to be a Korn kid.

Even though I have tried to block most of grades 7-9 from my memory, I do remember a few choice details. The first one being I was a loser. I mean, that's not something one can just forget. I had two friends in middle school. We went to one girl's house every weekend and listened to Korn. That was our thing. We'd listen to Korn, dance to Korn, talk in Korn chat rooms online, and read the same Korn articles from the new ''Circus'' magazine over and over. It was our thing because we didn't have anywhere else to go. We didn't have anywhere else to go because we didn't have any other friends. We had no friends. We were losers.

The next thing I remember is how horribly I dressed. Of course, as everyone gets older, they will look at pictures from middle school and cringe, but being the emo fashionite I am now, I just want to puke everywhere. I think a lot of my fashion problems stemmed from me trying to ease my mom into my new look. My collection of jeans consisted of two pairs of light denim tapered-leg jeans and one pair of dark denim bell-bottoms. I hadn't yet been introduced to the wonderful world of boot cut. Then I would wear my bulky, ugly vans. Just big, blue, plain ugly skate shoes for a girl whose skateboarding skills went no farther than sitting on one while it rolled down her driveway. I bought them at Kohl's. Everyday my hair was pulled back into a ponytail, or a messy bun. Then I would try to apply make up. More specifically eye liner. Everyday I tried. Everyday I screwed up. Everyday I played it off as heroin-chic. To complete my look, I chose size XL T-shirts. I can't say its possible for me to look any better than with huge Korn T-shirt and tapered-leg jeans on. Oh and I'd always tuck the front part of the T-shirt into my pants and leave the rest hanging down. Maybe I just wanted to show off the sexy fly of my pants.

My two friends and I sat alone at lunch everyday. I later learned that because of this, a few kids actually thought we were drug addicts, and were afraid of us. We would sit and bitch about how much we hated everyone at school, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Gwen Stefani. We hated girls who were cute and popular. Actually, we hated all girls who weren't us. We enjoyed calling them ''dumb bitches.'' We would also talk about Korn at lunch. There was always the unavoidable question: ''If you could marry one member of Korn, who would it be?'' I think I chose Munky, or David, I'm not sure. Then things started going downhill. One day I was at my locker, minding my own business, staring at a picture of Jonathon Davis, when another girl, a preppy cute blonde girl, came up to my locker, pointed at my shrine of Korn pictures torn straight outta ''Circus'', and told me how much she absolutely loved Korn. I was furious. My whole life was crumbling around me. All this time my friends and I believed we were special because we were blessed with this amazing band that no one else knew about. It was the only thing that made us seem important. Then that bitch had to come along and ruin it all.

Shortly there after Korn released a new album. It was the beginning of the end. They finally received the radio play they had desired and their video was in heavy rotation on MTV. I should have been happy for them, right? I mean, this is what they'd always wanted. What they'd spent years touring for. Isn't it supposed to be about what they want? Well it wasn't to me. Korn was my baby and my baby had sold out. I was fucking pissed. I decided the best thing I could possibly do was to start listening to pop punk. That eventually led me to emo and indie rock. And here I am now. As happy as an emo kid could be.