March 28
Waking up to the first day of a new semester felt odd. On one hoof, I was going back to how things had been before vacation, with classes and eating in the dining hall and everything, but my classes were different, and so were everybody else's.
I hadn't thought about everybody else at first. I got on my gear and took off for a morning flight. The grumpy man was on the radio again, but even he was a bit more cheerful than usual. Maybe it was the nice weather, or maybe he missed me.
I got in a good flight around downtown. It's kind of fun to follow the streets and pretend that I'm a car: I have to remind myself not to cut corners, 'cause I'm above the buildings and could do that, but that would be cheating.
Sometimes if the traffic lights aren't in the car's favor, I can stay ahead of it. Other times it gets all green lights and I can't keep up.
It would be funner to fly lower, but there are all sorts of dangerous wires that cross the road. Some of them look thick enough to land on—birds do, and squirrels sometimes run along them, their little bushy tails flipping from side to side for balance—but I was told that it was way too dangerous for me. All of us pegasuses were shown a movie made by Golden State Power and Light showing two wires stuck into the end of a tube of meat humans call hot dogs and then turned on, which made the hot dog explode. They said that the same thing would happen to us if we touched any of the wires or landed on the poles.
Obviously squirrels and birds don't watch those movies.
I'd worked up a pretty good lather by the time I'd had two 'races' through town. I lost both because the traffic lights were against me.
Then when I got back to my room, Peggy was gone, and when I went into the bathroom somebody was already in the shower. I wasn't later than normal—and then I remembered that it was a new semester, and probably everyone else also had a new schedule.
I thought it was Peggy, but I wasn't certain. There were so many different smells in the bathroom it was hard to be really sure, so even though I thought about flying up and sticking my head over the top of the shower cubicle to see, I didn't. I just knocked on the door.
It wasn't Peggy, it was Ruth. I said that I needed to take a shower 'cause I was all lathered up from my exercise and she said 'you snooze you lose,' and I said that I hadn't been snoozing, I'd been flying. She laughed and said that she'd be done soon and I should just be patient. So I sat on the little bench on the wall and was patient until she was done and then I really had to hurry and didn't get much more done than rinsing the sweat out of my coat before I had to dash off to breakfast. I wish humans weren't so weird about sharing showers.
I got to my first class a little bit early—I thought it might take me longer than it did to find the room. It was in the Olds-Upton building, which is the same building that my climate science class had been in, but this room was on a different floor than that one had been.
It was pretty much the same inside. I picked a seat where I was close to the front and could also see the door so that I could watch people as they came in and see if there was anyone who I was friends with in the class. I hoped there would be. I hadn't thought about how all the students in the class were going to change, too, which meant that I might have to make some new friends.
I got lucky in this class, though: both Keith and Sean were taking it, and they both sat next to me. Keith leaned over and asked me what a nice pony like me was doing in a class like this, and I stuck my tongue out at him.
The professor came in before the whole class had gotten seated and just stood up front waiting until five minutes after class should have started, when one last student came in through the door. He said that there was always one.
He started by taking attendance, and then he said that since he now knew all our names it was time that we learn his, which was Gurkiran Banerjee, and if we had trouble pronouncing it we could just call him 'sir' or 'doctor', or if we were trying to get in his good graces, 'doctor sir.'
That got a good laugh around the classroom, and he began his introduction to the class. It was kind of hard to understand him because he had an unfamiliar accent, and his voice had a sort of lilt to it, almost like listening to a zebra, but he didn't rhyme.
After a bit, though, I got used to it and I could make sense of him. I'd noticed that some of my friends had slightly different accents, and it was a lot more pronounced with Trevor and his friends (especially Leon, but he did it on purpose because it helped his street cred).
We didn't get a whole lot of actual classwork done, because he just covered some of the most basic basic things, and how we were going to be graded at the end of the semester, and then he gave us a quiz that didn't count for any points at all just to see what we knew.
It was all pretty simple multiple-choice questions, except for the last one which asked who the most handsome man in the class was and I could choose between the professor or the closest man to my right or left, or none of the above and I chose none of the above, but when we went over the answers he said that anyone who answered anything other than 'the professor' failed the class automatically, and my ears fell but then he said that he was only kidding.
When class was over, he stood by the door and shook everyone's hand and thanked them for coming, which I thought was a little odd. And he asked me to stay behind for a minute. So I sat back down and waited for everyone else to leave and then he turned and sat down next to me and asked me if I was sure that I was ready for this class. He said that he wasn't going to give me any slack just because I was a pony, and that made me kind of mad. I told him that I had expected it to be hard, but I thought I was smart enough to figure it out and I didn't think he ought to be telling me what I should or should not do.
That kind of backed him down, and he said that he didn't mean to be offensive or condescending, but that since I was from a completely different culture with a different understanding who spoke a different native language, that there might be some special challenges for me that the other students didn't face. And he told me that he had been born and raised in a city in India called Muzaffarpur, and his family had moved to America when he was in high school and it had taken him years to figure things out and he was still occasionally confused by America.
I felt bad, 'cause I'd thought that he was picking on me for being a pony, when really he was looking after my best interests although maybe not in the best way. I told him that I was sure I'd figure it out, and he said that if I needed any help understanding things, he'd be glad to help me.
I had lunch after that, and then went to my next class which was in Dewing. I got there early, but it didn't do me any good because there was another class in there already. I got a look at the early arrivers in the hall and there wasn't anybody that I knew very well, although a couple of people were familiar, like Melissa who had been in my poetry class, but there wasn't anybody who I knew really well.
We had to stand out of the way while the other class left, and when I could get in I picked a seat that was a little farther back than I would have liked but gave me a good view of anybody else coming in, but nobody I knew wound up coming in after all. It was funny; I'd sort of gotten the idea that the campus was small enough that I ought to know everybody by now and besides Melissa there were a few other people who looked familiar, but who I didn't know at all.
The professor was called Amy Cunningham, but she said that we could just call her Amy if we wanted to. Instead of taking attendance like Doctor Sir Banerjee had, she went around the class and asked each of us our names and where we were from. I just said Equestria, 'cause the cloud outpost where I'd been living didn't really have a name that I could easily translate into English. Some of the earth ponies who lived below jokingly called us 'North Chonamare,' because they said that on all their maps the north was always up, and when they looked up, there we were, clearly north of them. And one of my friends called it skyseaponytown, which sounds a lot better in Equestrian.
I'd never really noticed before how humans always wanted to have a strong sense of where they were from. They'd name the town where they'd lived, and if it wasn't an important town, they'd name one that was near it, so that someone who was familiar with geography would know exactly where they were from. And a lot of my friends from Michigan just pointed to their hand, because Michigan is shaped like a hand. (I wonder if there are any states shaped like a hoof?)
A girl called Madison was from a town called Climax which was near Kalamazoo, and that made a couple of people snicker. She just rolled her eyes.
After we'd all gotten done with our introductions, Professor Cunningham explained how the class would be graded and handed out a schedule that included what reading we ought to be doing throughout the quarter. Then she explained how cultural anthropology was the study of different human cultures.
I noticed on the schedule that she had assigned us some reading already, so we'd be starting the next class at a gallop.
At dinner, everybody talked about what they'd done over Spring Break and how they liked their classes so far. Christine had visited New Orleans which is a city in Louisiana that used to be underwater, and Joe had gone to Japan, and Sean had spent the entire week at home playing games and setting up a new website on the internet.
I thought about reading through some anthropology, but decided that I would have time to do that tomorrow, and I had promised Liz that I would read more of the Bible, so I went back to reading Joshua. I couldn't understand why they thought it was important to circumcise themselves, and I had to ask Peggy what exactly they were cutting off because my computer told me but I wasn't sure what a foreskin was. She showed me how to get pictures on the internet, and I looked at a bunch and told her that Aric was circumcised she said that she really didn't need to know that. So I didn't ask her if her boyfriend was or not.
It said that they marched around Jericho and took the city, and they kept their word and saved Rahab and her kin. Then they burned the city and all within it, and I was a little confused with how that was written because it almost sounded like that meant the people from Jericho, too.
They didn't capture Ai because they didn't follow God's instructions again. And that didn't go well for some of them, because Joshua found out that they had taken things that they should not have and killed them.
And then they took the city of Ai and killed everyone in it and destroyed the city. That felt to me like a bad thing to do, but if God had said it was okay? It was hard to wrap my head around. Surely there were people in the city who weren't bad, and who would be just as happy living with Joshua as their leader rather than their old king. And probably the people in Jericho would have, too.
I thought I ought to ask Liz about that. She would probably know the answer.
I had just finished the part where Joshua had gathered all the Israelites together and read all the rules that Moses had gotten from God when Aric knocked on our door and asked if I wanted to go play Durak, and of course I did so I hugged him and kissed him and we went together in Winston to the coffee shop.
Everyone there had stories about their Spring Breaks, too. Aric had picked up a crazy hitchhiker who told them stories about being a radio operator in Vietnam and then they had spent one night camping out in a cemetery near Muskegon. James and Elizabeth went to Miami Beach together, and said it was very nice. Seth said that he went to Cancun, which is in Mexico, and he said that it was fun to be the only sober one because girls lost all their inhibitions when they were drunk. Elizabeth said that wasn't true, and James started to say something and then her face got red and she gave him a death glare and he shut right up.
We played a couple of hands and I lost once because I forgot that Seth still had an ace of trump, and then Aric drove me to his house and we made up for a week apart.
I feel like there were some personal anecdotes in this chapter.
What class is her first class, you don't seem to say.
I wish Silver had been a bit more explicit about what her two classes were. I think the second was just cultural anthropology (too bad she doesn't know Lyra - she'd be super jealous right about now), but I'm still not sure what the first one was. Still, at least the professor seems like a good guy. I try to liven up my own classes with some humor too. A shame I don't have a doctorate, or I'd make that "Doctor Sir" joke too. (Also, how cute is it that Silver actually calls him that? )
P.S. Prepare for at least a few people to argue about circumcision. I have my own opinion on it, mind you, but I'm gonna take a big ol' pass on talking about it in the comments.
I'm getting better. I'm fairly certain they had sex.
It's been a struggle with her to know when she's innocent and when she's naughty. I've often needed confirmation on it.
Not really, but Florida is shaped like a... um... like a certain cloud sculpture one of your friends made.
(Don't ask me if it's circumcised because I really don't want to think about that.)
It's my theory that the first time we see a zebra on the show other than Zaccora they will be wondering why the ponies expect them to speak in rhyme.
Wait, so what class does Doctor Sir Banerjee oversee?
7245472 (re: small text)
I'm not an expert, but I don't think horse anatomy works that way. Ow.
7245472
It's not, unfortunately. As an entire state of unwashed heathen criminality, the everglades and key largo are the only thing protecting the ocean from the taint of Miami and central florida.
I should know, I live there!
You know, I'm pretty sure that IS what it meant.
Yeah, what the heck was her first class?
Finally we know Aric is circumcised
Silver Glow delivering what you really need to know when you have to know it
Good luck Liz.
This gives us an idea of Silvers top speed, she's not as fast as I thought she might be, I guess not every Pegasus can be Rainbow Dash.
I had a professor say we could area him as Lord once, don't take remember his reasoning but I remember it was pretty stupid. I didn't like him very much.
If your hometown's name don't translate well, just don't translate it, it would impress your classmate to hear a long name they can't really pronounce.
In fact, don't translate, it's more fun that way!
I think sir doctor is teaching Theology, it was one the suggestion that came back a lot and does require a cultural background.
Except that I think Silver would've mentionned it if she had a class about god...
The other popular suggestions were anthropology, biology, history, feminism and cinematography.
And it could be something else entirely...
7242983 That's what I get for stuffing my pie hole with breakfast tacos.
Excellent new chapter. A wee bit too much information for Peggy I'm sure.
I suppose Dr. Sir Banerjee meant that postclass warning as a sign of respect, but it did come across as really condescending. Also, I'm going to have to join the chorus wondering just what he teaches, though my current guess is another climatology course. It's in the same building as the previous one, after all. Not a strong indicator, but it's the only one I have to go on.
Also, an anthropology course? That should be quite interesting for Silver.
Another cute chapter, eh?^^ (And guess Onto The Pony Planet got delayed, eh?)
I didn't realize that I was born in Atlantis.
I bet Cayenne would like to know.
i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/430/609/3d9.png
7245741
I don't suppose you went to Cal Poly, did you? We have Lord Patton, I believe on account of the fact that he owns land.
Are the professors you use the actual ones from the school or have you invented them for the sake of the story?
I really don't know what to think about Silver and her little bible study sessions. Its like watching her try to muddle through philosophy but ten times worse. She doesn't really understand what she is reading. It is made even worse by the fact that everyone she seems to have seriously talked to about it is either unwilling to discuss it in any meaningful fashion or is a priest. There is no discussion about what she has read/learned and like in philosophy she accepts everything as truth, which is not necessarily the point of the exercise.
As a whole Silver appears to have a very trusting attitude when it comes to things she has learned and she seems to get confused when presented with contradictory positions. Maybe for her things that teachers tell her and what is written in books = truth, regardless of their origin and conflicts of interests. I think that the people around her are doing her a disservice by trying not to offend/confuse her when it comes to discussing their opinion of what is in the bible.
Shouldn't ponies learn something about religion and all that stuff before they go to Earth? Silver looks clueless. Which is strange in it's own right - religion is so ingrained in the nature of people. Ponies do have legends? Creation myths? Or maybe all they have is history and solid facts? "Celestia told us all about how she and Luna had made Equestria from stardust and magic. Have a look at these photos. How did she herself came to being? They teach it in the high school in details. You should read "On the Origin of Alicorns" by Starswirl."
7246149
As much as I love the story, I have to confess this always struck me as a bit of a weak point for this fic. No one seems particularly prepared for ponies attending school on earth, (for example, she's the only pony there and has absolutely no support system in place), and largely there doesn't seem to be anything going the other way.
It doesn't really bother me that ponies don't necessarily have religion, since religion conveys a certain about of faith (which is, in a large way, why she's struggling with religion/philosophy) and ponies don't necessarily need 'faith' to see supernatural things: she takes the bible literally because in Equestria, they have a literal god sitting on her fat ass eating mountains of cake on a day to day basis. It does, however, bother me that no one has sat down and discussed this with the ponies heading over.
What does Banerjee teach?
Thálassaouranóspólimikróálogo?
Funny that she didn't say the name because it didn't translate. There's a place in Ireland with almost the same name - Connemara. There's even a breed of ponies called Connemara ponies!
7246067 yep, that's exactly who I'm talking about. I had him for fluids 1 and hated him.
7245709 It's my headcanon that most non-athletic pegasi cruise at about 30MPH and can manage about double that for sprints (which puts them about in the same class as a peregrine falcon). Rainbow Dash is just extraordinarily athletic and has a magical talent for speed.
Alrighty, Silver is really getting back into the swing of things. These new classes aught to be interesting. Also, I love how she just casually mentioned the status of Aric's equipment to Peggy.She has yet to learn a few social taboos.
Oh you wonderful little mare, don't ever change.
Also, to those concerned at Silver's 'Bible study', i would offer that she is that most rare combination of an individual who is both profoundly open-minded and entirely rational. A boatload of Jesuits would find her a challenge. She will consider your perspective, she will respect your position, she will ask questions, those questions will be both immediate and challenging. Though I do not identify as Christian myself, my experience is broad enough that I am certain that strong Christians would welcome this but weak Christians would not. I rather suspect Silver might be interested in a discourse with older Christian perspectives whilst contemporary American evangelism would likely run into a wall.
I hope Liz is prepared.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
7245473 In "The Journal of the Two Sisters" the other zebras rhyme as well.
This was a good chapter, although I also want to know what her first class is.
7247733
7246433
7246078
I really want Silver to get locked in a room with a Dawkins analogue, a Catholic and a Protestant that despise each other, Liz, a Jew, and maybe a Muslim if she's read the Koran, and they're all trying their hardest to convert her.
I think Silver could ask one question and then sit back, watch, and learn a lot about religion and the people who care about it.
7246672 yeah I can't find it either.
A place where there's a space before commas. It is an evil and disgusting place. (apologies to anyone from Muzaffarpur)
the Americas. Plural.
7246672 What language is that?
7248092
Corrections made, thank you!
7248092 It look like greek, but I don't know it well enough to tell if it is genuie or not.
7248092 It's what you get when you ask Google Translate to convert 'sky sea small horse town' into Greek.
7249126 I wonder what happens if we translate it back...
7247967
I really want to see Liz's reaction when Silver Glow brings up her porn bookmarks when asking Bible questions.
7245411
Just a few.
7245437
Yup, and the first is a math/physics class (it's actually listed in both departments at K).
Surprisingly, I don't think anybody had anything to say about it.
7245450
Yes, they did.
7245472
I wonder if Floridians drop trou to show where they live?
7245473
I think that all zebra shamans do. It's part of their mystique.
And thus begins Silver's foray into the Spring semester. What new adventures will she have, and what new things will she learn?
Never change Silver Glow. Then again, that's one of the reason we (readers) love you. That, and your (mostly) eternal optimism and hidden depths.
7245540
And your whole state is only one really big hurricane or a few meters of sea level rise away from oblivion.
7245647
That is exactly what it meant.
7245680
She's just a limitless (and pantsless) source of useful information.
7245709
I might have to bump it up just a bit. After this comment, I looked up the flight speeds of birds, and they're faster than I thought they were.
7245825
Odds are pretty good her boyfriend's circumcised as well.
7245928
Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which, especially if he's not really good at telling students what they might not be good at. My college advisor thought I'd be good at Latin, which was not true at all. I was very, very bad at Latin.
7245955
I'm hoping to finish it up this weekend . . . the play absorbed all of last weekend, and then last week at work we got really slammed, and I had to stay late pretty much every day.
7246057
Well, some of it was underwater for a while after Katrina.
7246063
Cayenne already knows.
As an aside, since I like to be accurate in my research, I googled it just to see what kind of results came up.
7246078
It's a mixture.
That's something Liz is trying to be careful about, as much as she can. Silver Glow approached her and asked 'who is God?' and Liz is--rightly or wrongly--trying to take the most neutral approach by saying 'here is a book about Him, read it and draw your own conclusions.' Liz is in an interesting position, because as a staff member at the college and the college minister, she both has to teach people religion and faith, and those are two different things.
7246149
Well, that's a really good question. I'd assume that they have myths--IIRC, a lot of ponies thought Nightmare Moon was a myth, which suggests to me that they have others. But they also have a ruler who is if not eternal, at least very, very long lived. And it's possible that there are dragons who have lived long enough to know second-hand how the world came about, or at least what it was like thousands of years ago, maybe before ponies even came to be. So if Celestia told them that she'd heard from Graarak the Younger that ponies sprang forth because Graarak the Elder wanted somebody to mine gems for him, they'd believe that. And that might not be faith; that might literally be true.
7246433
I think that's just in their nature. Princess Celestia prepared Twilight for freeing Nightmare Moon by telling her to go to Ponyville and make some friends, and she apparently sprung it on Twilight at the very last minute. "Oh, about that birthday party you were going to go to, sorry, pack your things.'
And she does have a support system in place. She's got Peggy and Aric and Meghan and Christine and Sean and Trevor and Cedric and Leon and Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and all her other friends as well.
I get where you're coming from; by human standards they just tossed her into college and said 'good luck,' but by pony standards she's got a lot of close friends, and that's really all she needs.
7246672
Yeah, that looks pretty good.
7246747
There is. And Connemara in Irish is Chonamara. The other pony breed I was thinking of making a pun off of was the Fell ponies.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Fell_pony.jpg/800px-Fell_pony.jpg
7246763
I'd say that's pretty reasonable. I was looking up bird speeds after an earlier comment, and I think that's a good ballpark for an average pegasus.
BTW, did you know that the peregrine falcon can hit 200mph in a dive, and the white-throated needletail can hit 105 in straight and level flight?
7246900
I hope I can keep up on the math class. I found a series of YouTube videos explaining it; I hope that they explain it for idiots. Or else I'm in real trouble.
Probably never will figure them out, either.
7247733
This. Silver's not the kind of pony who can be indoctrinated very easily, if at all. And I think you're spot-on with the strong Christians vs. the weak Christians. In my experience, strong Christians are willing to engage in discourse, and know when to bend and when to be strong; weak Christians post 'I-told-you-so' memes on Facebook.
7247967
That would be awesome. I'm not even sure who I'd put my money on.
7251442
Silver hasn't got any porn bookmarks. Not yet, anyway.
7258269
What class is she taking? I've been over that entire section several times, and I'm still not sure if I'm just derping horribly, or if it's just never mentioned.
7261138
It's never mentioned, but she says what it is in Wednesday's entry.
It is too bad that the religious bigots sexually mutilated the genitals of Mister Aric. Soon, Miss Silver Glow will conclude that god is monster far worse than Tirek, Grogar, et cetera.
I'm slightly surprised that Silver forgot about a little exchange before Sodom and Gomorrah got destroyed. Abraham asks if God would destroy the cities if there were even 5 righteous living there. God answered that He wouldn't. The next chapter opens with angels evacuating Lot before the city got destroyed.
When though it's not stated, I assume Jericho and the other cities were in the same boat
Had a bit of a Destroy All Humans moment there. :oops:
If it's vaguely circle-shaped, then sure.
Goooood Morning, VIETNAM!
Me.
Cancun (kahn-cune SAY IT RIGHT PEOPLE) is amazing. Great climate, beautiful water, nice forests, and lots of stuff to do.
it would be so funny if they could actually breed.
7740642
Ohio would probably actually be the closest of all the states, to be honest. Pointy on one end, with a little v-notch for the frog. . .
8020071
Me, too, if you count writing a story 'programming.'
I've never been, unfortunately.
That would be a surprise, for sure. They started off late enough that even if Silver Glow had gotten pregnant on her first estrus, she wouldn't have had the foal/baby until she got back to Equestria.