Personal Narrative: Planet Earth

Overwhelmed by tears as I went down to pick up my mangled RC car, I noticed a green piece of metal. Something

I had never seen before that had been contained within its plastic compartment. An intricate puzzle of resistors, capacitors, and circuits that changed the way I viewed my toys, and how I played and thought. I thought, "What was this mysterious green metal item?" I asked my parents, who responded, "That's its brain, Zach. It's called a circuit board, and it makes the car go." This was the most earth-shattering information I had ever heard at that point in my life. I thought I was the brain. I thought I had the power to move the object by willing it to do so.

Suddenly, everything had a brain and a function. I would ask questions until

My own curiosity had become my greatest weapon on the path of knowledge. I would watch the Discovery Channel on TV and feed my urge to know and understand. My conversations with other kids in elementary school were sometimes awkward; I did not know what all the kids' TV shows were because I spent my time watching How It's

Made or History Channel documentaries. My grandfather had gifted me the documentary titled Planet Earth, which revealed the wild earth around us, and I had made my entire family watch it with me for the subsequent month.

Today, my curiosity has pushed me to pursue ideas that I would not have before. When I was thirteen years old, I watched an episode of the Mythbusters and witnessed them create a hoverboard from a surfboard, plastic and a leaf blower. For that entire year, I saved up every penny I had in order to create what they had made on the show. When Christmas had come, the only present I wanted from my parents was a leaf blower. I could not describe the joy I had that morning when I unwrapped it and immediately ran to the garage to finish my design.

Unfortunately, the design failed to glide across the ground and I was back to the drawing board for my