• Published 25th Feb 2016
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Silver Glow's Journal - Admiral Biscuit



Silver Glow takes an opportunity to spend a year at an Earth college, where she'll learn about Earth culture and make new friends.

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April 20 [420]

April 20

When I got back from my morning flight, Peggy told me today was a special day: it was four-twenty.

I didn't know what that was, so she explained how some people smoked pot—which is what they call marijuana—and today celebrated that.

I had seen people smoking cigarettes but pot wasn't the same because you weren't supposed to unless you were doing it to treat a disease, although she said it was legal in Colorado and some other places. I thought it might be interesting to try but Peggy said she wasn't sure if that was a good idea. She wanted to know if I ever had smoked pot before or knew any ponies who had, and I said that I didn't.

So she said that I probably ought not try it at all, just to be safe. She said that I might hear some people talking about how great it was but it really wasn't anything special and that if I wanted to get high I should use my wings instead.

I told her that I already had and she laughed and then leaned down and ran her hand through my sweaty mane and told me to hurry up and get into the shower or else I'd miss my turn.

That was something for me to think about when I was showering. I liked drinking socially sometimes but that was about it. I knew that there were some ponies who drank too much: some of the sailor ponies especially when they were on shore drank themselves senseless, and I'd heard of ponies eating thorn-apple because it made them hallucinate, but I'd never tried that. I didn't think it was very smart.

So I thought that even if I could try pot I shouldn't.

Nobody at breakfast felt like making a big deal out of the day, either. They'd had more fun for April Fool's Day. Our conversation was as normal as any breakfast where Christine wasn't eating her breakfast like a Tyrannosaurus Rex or making a breakfast village and destroying it.

I asked Sean what he thought we were going to learn in class and he said that he wasn't sure. He told me about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which was where you couldn't measure both the position and speed of a particle at the same time, but he didn't think that was what he was going to cover. Chaos theory was broader than that, he said, and he thought the professor was thinking of a broader principle.

I'd noticed that lots of formulas and principles and equations had names, and I asked him if that was because a person named Heisenberg or Lorenz or whoever had discovered them, and he said that was the case. He wanted to know if we did that, and I said that there were Wonderbolts stunts that were named for the pegasus who had invented them, and there were also unicorn spells that had been named after the first unicorn to cast them. (Well, I figured that was why, anyway.)

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee started out by drawing a point and then asked us if that was supposed to be a point in the motion of a pendulum could we really actually measure it? And then he explained how in astronomy they had the same problem; you knew that a planet was about there, but you couldn't know exactly where it was.

The inaccuracy was what he called 'error bounds,' and that was how far off you expected your observation to potentially be. I knew about those in the form of significant digits: when we calculated in cloud class, it wasn't acceptable to get a result which was more precise than the numbers we had started with, because we couldn't get information we'd never had as a result of the calculation.

Then he drew a little circle around his point and said it was called the 'error ball,' which several students in the class thought was a very funny name. Over time, the error ball became smaller and more elliptical because of the eigenvalues, and that was what all stable systems would do.

Unstable systems were different; they could actually get bigger as time went on. And if there were complex equations inside, any given point in the ball could rotate, and the ball could get bigger or smaller. And in the chaotic systems they were stretched and folded over each other again and again. That kind of reminded me of metalworking which I knew a little bit about because of my sister.

He said that the shape it made could be described by Smale Horseshoe Mapping and everyone in the class looked at me and I just held up an unshoed hoof and said that I didn't know anything about them and even Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee laughed at that.

Professor Amy talked about the differences in marriage and kinship in different cultures. She said that there was actual biological kinship and that there was also fictive kinship, which was things like relatives by marriage. Then she said that there was the family of origin, which was the family you were born into, and the family of procreation, which was the family your offspring belonged to.

She also talked about a thing called exogamy which meant that you had to marry outside a certain group, and one example she gave was that you usually couldn't marry a blood sibling. And then there was also endogamy which meant a group which you had to marry inside of.

She explained how the rules of a society could even say where you went to live when you got married, and there were even fancy terms for that like neolocal and unilocal and matrilocal and patrilocal and it was all very confusing. No wonder unicorns are always keeping track of their ancestors if they have to follow all those rules. I was glad that we didn't do anything like that.

I guess we have some rules, but they're not written down; everypony knows them. Like how when a stallion's an adult he goes off to somewhere else.

It was strange how a class that had seemed pretty boring to me was so interesting to everyone else, though. Lots of people were talking on their way out of class about what Professor Amy had said and how they had never thought about the rules for marriage.

I read through some of the second book of Samuel before dinner, which started off with David becoming king of Israel. But like everyone before him, no matter how much he tried to be good he broke God's rules when he saw a woman in her bath and lusted for her. When he got her pregnant he decided that he would have to kill her husband, and that made God angry and to punish David, God made his son get sick and die.

I couldn't read any more beyond that point. I was already a bit distracted because I could feel that the weather was changing and I told myself before dinner I was going to look at the NOAA page and see if I was right that storms were coming.

It bothered me that David who was supposed to be so great and in such favor with God would do such a thing, and that brought me back to the idea that marriage was stupid. Obviously Bathsheba was interested in him or else she would have just told him no, but David was afraid of what her husband might do even though it had been as much his wife's doing. Unless I wasn't understanding and David had raped her.

I might not have been right about how marriage was supposed to work, either, and I thought I should ask about that because maybe I was jumping to conclusions when I shouldn’t be. It didn't feel like a good dinnertime topic, people liked to laugh and relax and sometimes complain about classes at dinner.

I could wait a day to know, I decided. Liz made marriages so surely she knew about them, and I could just ask her.

When I looked on the computer at the weather it said that there were going to be thunderstorms tomorrow, and I was looking forward to that, but it would be weird to be watching them and not doing anything with them. That would be a strange change for me.

I went over to Aric's a little bit earlier than I'd planned, and he was out in the driveway again working on Winston. He showed me what the radiator was that had leaked and said that he had jury-rigged a repair because he didn't have all the right tools but he was fixing it correctly now.

That was fun to watch and he even let me help hold things in place for him while he worked. Just like on a ship, every little piece had its own special name.

Under the truck was a flat pail full of sweet-smelling liquid that he called coolant and my nose kept being drawn to that because unlike nearly everything else on the truck it smelled really tasty and I wondered if it was okay to drink. I was going to ask him, but he was kinda busy trying to line up bolts then he asked me if I could help him hold the fan shroud in place. He said that it didn't fit quite right because it had gotten broken before and he hadn't bought a replacement for it yet.

I had to lie under the truck on my back to hold it in place, and that wasn't very comfortable because his driveway was made up of sharp pebbles.

Some of the coolant was still dripping off the bottom of the truck, too, and I got some on my muzzle and without even thinking I licked it off and it was really sweet but a moment later it left a horrible bitter taste in my mouth and Aric just laughed and said I was a real mechanic now.

When it was all put back together he poured the pail out into the radiator and then added some more until it was full and said that I'd been really helpful. I thought he was just being nice; I'd only held a couple of things when he told me to.

To celebrate we drove Winston to the beer store (which wasn't far at all) and he said that I could get whatever I wanted, so I picked a bottle of Dark Horse ale which he thought was really funny and so did the clerk at the counter.

We sat on the couch together and cuddled for a while and then went up to Aric's room and got undressed for bed but neither of us really felt like having sex, so we just snuggled up together and talked quietly for a little longer.

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