• 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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March 29 [poetry debate]

March 29

Tuesdays are nice because I don't have any classes before lunch. That gave me and Aric some more time to play in bed and then afterward I told him more about my trip and he told me more about his. He and David and Angela had gone up along the west coast of Michigan but instead of taking the highway they'd gone on all back roads just for the fun of it. He said that it took them three days just to get up to the Mackinac Bridge, and then they had gone over that and into the Upper Peninsula. He said that it had been a little bit colder there than it was here and they all had to huddle together in the bed of the truck to stay warm and one night it was just too cold and they wound up staying at a hotel instead but that's what adventuring was all about.

He didn't have any real breakfast food, only strange flat pastries called Pop Tarts that had a crust that was too dry and jelly that tasted sour and fake. I don't know why humans like to eat such bad food. Maybe they have different taste buds, and can't taste how bad it is.

I told him that I probably couldn't come over Wednesday night because I was planning to go on a spa date with Meghan and then watch Zootopia. I hadn't set it up for sure yet, and I told him I'd send him a telephone telegram when I knew for certain. He said that he'd miss me, and I told him I’d miss him, too. Then I told him that he could exercise with me, and he said that the only way he would go running around the neighborhood was if he was being chased by wolves.

Since I'd forgotten my flight gear, I just trotted around the neighborhood instead. My legs needed the exercise anyway; I hadn't gotten hardly any on the train and all my muscles felt stiff and my joints felt creaky. So I kind of worked up to speed until I reached a canter, which is the best pace for being on the ground. It's easy and smooth, and my hooves make a really nice beat on the pavement.

I cantered around the neighborhood and whenever I got to a street crossing I extended my wings and did a broad glide-jump across just for fun.

When I got back to my dorm, the showers were completely deserted, and while I was in there nobody else showed up at all. I kept expecting Brianna to come in before I was done but she didn't, so I spent a little bit of extra time in the hot water relaxing my muscles.

I also had plenty of time to do a good job of preening, and as I was tugging at a loose feather that was probably an early moult (I always had a couple of them right before my first estrus) I thought that maybe I should save some of them and make a dreamcatcher like the one I'd seen in the store in Chicago, or maybe a couple. I could give them to my friends, and if they were hoofmade and had my feathers on it it would be really personal.

At lunch, I decided to sit with Trevor and his friends. As soon as I'd set my tray down Cedric reached over and hugged me. Leon said that he'd spent all of his Spring Break at home in the hood, and Cedric punched him in the shoulder and said that his family lived in Bloomfield Hills which was hardly the hood.

Leon said that he could see Eight Mile from his house, and Cedric asked him if he was standing on the roof of his mansion and using binoculars, or if he just had the servants report back. It sounded kind of mean to me, but I think it was just the two of them making fun of each other.

I was curious what Eight Mile was, and Cedric told me that was the dividing road between the safe, well-off suburbs of Detroit and parts of Detroit proper. Detroit was largely a bad city that was trying to revive itself, and most of the suburbs around it were a lot nicer. Trevor said that wasn’t entirely true, and Cedric said he was making it a bit simpler for me.

Leon told me that all the proper brothers from Michigan either came from Detroit or Flint, and all the rest were just wannabes, so he had to pretend that he was from Detroit because otherwise Cedric wouldn't talk to him, and Cedric rolled his eyes. It was funny to listen to the two of them talk, even though I didn’t get half of what they were saying.

Trevor interrupted them to ask if I was in a poetry class this semester too, and I said that I was, right after lunch, and he made a fist and bumped my hoof with it. He said that we literate types ought to stick together because we were better than the other ghetto rats at the table. Cedric just crossed his arms and snorted, and Leon said that a wise man knows his place.

We walked together to class and picked seats that were right next to each other and waited for Conrad to arrive. Unlike my other classes, there were a lot of familiar faces in this one, including Melissa.

He walked into class and sat down and took attendance really quick—he already knew most of the people in the class. I guess even the ones who hadn't been in the last poetry class had had a class with him before, or else he was just really good at remembering names.

He said that we were going to start with something fun, and introduced us to the 'Bulletin Debate.' That was an Australian newspaper (Australia is a country on the other side of the world that is full of kangaroos and poisonous snakes) and two major poets had competed with poems in the newspaper.

I really liked that idea, and it was something that they ought to bring back. All I ever saw in USA Today was bad news on the front page and the bad news continued throughout the first section. The second section sometimes had some good news, and then there was a section about sports and another about business and pages of letters and numbers that were describing stocks, which is a thing that is bought and sold at stock markets. If they added a page with a poem, probably more people would want to read the newspaper and not leave it on top of the trash can.

Conrad had us read the first poem, which was called Up the Country, and was about Henry Lawson's trip. It reminded me of the desert scrubland we'd gone through on the train, although we hadn't seen any wallabies or dingos (or if we did, Mister Barrow didn't point them out), and I could kind of sympathize with his remarks. It was hard to imagine how people or ponies lived in places like that, or why they would want to. Land like that was fun to see on the train, and I would have enjoyed stopping for a day to fly around and play in the thermals, but I don't think it's a place I would want to live.

That didn't sit right with Banjo Paterson, who lived in the bush that Henry Lawson didn't like and he had a very different perspective on the whole thing. He said that city life was crowded and terrible and that out in the bush it was free. He said that it wasn't a barren desert at all but a vibrant grassland.

And he did a really good job of it, too. By the time the poem was over, I was re-thinking my earlier thoughts. Some of my cousins had jobs in cities like Baltimare and Manehattan and they talked about how wonderful the nightlife was and how they could choose different pubs to drink at as the mood suited them, and that sounded appealing, but was it as good as drinking a mug of mulled cider after your team had broken up a nor'easter? How did stepping out of a rooftop apartment and flying up to your sector compare to spending the night on a cloud outpost and watching the waves rolling underneath and crashing into the shore, and then spotting off in the distance a ship with tattered rigging that had just sailed through a storm?

I couldn't explain how I felt about living on the coast half as well as Mister Banjo explained living in the bush but I knew I would have to remember his words.

Neither of those two poems sat well with Edward George Dyson, so he wrote a poem too, and he talked about the rain and the heat and the dust and horses and sheep running off and having to stay up all night on watch, and he wasn't wrong either. I'd dragged my rump home after long days with so much salt-spray caked in my tail that it crunched when I walked, and there were days of being soaked in freezing rain or pea-soup fogs so thick that you couldn't see a hoof in front of your face, and days when the booming of the surf kept you up all night. And it was that kind of day that sometimes we'd talk about how much nicer it would be to live in a city where the weather was well-managed and every day was the same. But I think when you've done it for a while it gets in your blood and you can't leave. They say earth ponies are bonded to their land, and maybe sometimes pegasus ponies are too.

Conrad finished the class with Mister Lawson's The City Bushman where he sort of admitted that maybe life in the bush had been good once but now it was dried up and infested with sheep and not so good as it once was (sheep are dumb but look like little fluffy ground-clouds, so I kind of like them) and now things were better in the city and Mister Banjo should recognize that. He also said that drover's children could swear better than street urchins, and I thought that was true. I had never met a sailor who could say more than two sentences without swearing and some of it had rubbed off on me. The more they cursed their ship, the more they liked it. It was just how they were.

I guess the back-and-forth was kind of showing two people that were very different and couldn't quite agree on what was good and what was not. I thought about Gusty and how she liked wearing clothes and being in Los Angeles and didn't like being in high places, and I was the opposite of that, and I don't think either of us could convince the other that our way was better.

Conrad promised us that there were more poems in the debate—a good debate didn't end after only four poems, he said.

I would have liked to stay a little after his class, but I had to go help out the Equestrian professor and it would be rude to be late. There wasn't an actual language class scheduled in the spring (although there was a class called a seminar that met Wednesday afternoons that was more to keep everybody fresh on the language, 'cause if you don't keep practicing you forget what you know, and I was going to attend some of those classes to help but not the one tomorrow). She was teaching people about life in Equestria and she thought it would be interesting to have a couple of lessons from a pegasus' perspective, and she also wanted me to go over some of the material and see if there was anything that I thought ought to be added or changed.

I read through some of the material and had to ask her for some explanations, since she was using human references that I didn't understand, like where she said that pegasus cloud cities were similar to ancient Greek city-states. When she told me what those were I said that was sort of right and sort of not: the big cities like Cloudsdale and Las Pegasus were kind of like that, but that there were a lot of small cloud-villages that were near earth pony towns and were considered a cloud-based extension of the town down below by everypony, and in those places ponies usually followed the instructions of the earth-town mayor.

That took longer than I thought it would because government is complicated even when it's a sensible system where we just follow the instructions of the most capable pony in our village and if it comes to a point where she can't properly lead any more we find a different pony who can.

I sat with Meghan and Lisa and Becky for dinner, and Megan said that she would make us an appointment for tomorrow and get movie tickets and that we could take an Uber-car because she'd decided that they were okay because the company had taken steps to make sure that they were safe.

Then after dinner I did my homework for cultural anthropology, sent Aric a telephone telegram like I'd said I would, and went to bed early so that I would have time to fly and then take a proper shower, and figure out what everyone's morning schedule was.

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