A lyricist since grade school, a writer since kindergarten, and an incessant chatterbox since the age of three, my life has long quested for the chef d’oevre, the masterpiece, the culmination of Hannah C.: the composition that I bestow upon the world that may define me and my existence as thoroughly as possible. “Bomb of the Bongos,” “Textbooks and Torture,” The Volcano- never will I deny their importance in my heart and self-esteem. But their importance in my college application? Marginal. No, the quintessence of Hannah C. is no song, short story, or novel. My masterpiece is the time I wrote my physics homework using the diction of rap metal wizards Rage Against the Machine.
Rage Against the Machine is not the world’s greatest band, but they are the most unintentionally hilarious. Genius in the art of writing the same song 47 times and making it awesome every go, their vocabulary is more or less limited to “oil wars,” “guerrilla radio,” and “[expletive deleted] you, I won’t do what you tell me!” This, I felt, made for unequivocal communication of IB Physics’s Topic 8, which details the glory of electricity and global warming in 92 essay questions Mr.
Martinez didn’t consider important enough to include in his curriculum.
Luckily for me and the looming IB exam, electricity and global warming are my two favorite things to study. In fourth grade, I embarked on a quest to comprehend every aspect of electricity available to eight-year-olds, scouring libraries for knowledge of metallic bonds, greenhouse gases, and photovoltaic modules. Through my formative years I have fostered this knowledge with Science News and stolen textbooks, and glancing through my 92 Objective Statements I realized I did not even need to read the chapter. I did anyway, but it only amplified my already-dangerous overconfidence.
“Your responses are for your personal studying only,” Mr. Martinez assured us. “I’m not even going to read it.”
I’ll never be completely sure why I took “This is for your studying purposes only,” as “You should definitely use 155 swear words to answer these questions,” but I did. I spent three days and seven hours writing answers to questions I’d already encoded in my heart, and they were some of the most joyous hours of my junior year. There is something almost magical about reducing complex ideas to simplistic notions; brilliant about communicating mathematical applications as senseless barbarism.
It is only rarely that my creative demon rears its deformed nostrils, that I dive in sideways to a straightforward problem, but it is these excursions that teach me who I am. I am the person who solves conservation of energy problems with kinematics. I am the person who integrates improper fractions with seven integrands instead of long division. I am the person who sometimes sees the sensible way, sometimes sees the stupid way, but derives infinitely more pleasure in formulating my own arcane madness than memorizing the textbook approach. Every IB-Style exam in physics, every challenge problem in calculus, every data-based application in biology- a chance to use my own mind, my own problem-solving- this is where I shine. I can parrot biology back to you, demonstrate my perfectly spoon-fed calculus, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever enjoy it. What I need, what I crave, is my own initiative, my own words, love, drive, insanity-
I am Hannah C., I am bizarre, and my essence is Physics Objectives: Uncensored.
