April 4
Some Mondays I wake up ready to go and other Mondays I wake up wishing it wasn't Monday. This was the second kind of Monday.
Lying in bed and thinking about how miserable a morning is doesn't make things better, though. So I got up a bit reluctantly and put on my vest and the thought that I was about to fly cheered me up even though I had to put new batteries in my blinking light and it was the last ones I had. I should have thought of that yesterday at Meijer.
The grumpy man was on the radio again and he was even grumpier than normal and I thought that maybe I could offer to fly to the airport and give him a hug, but having to re-order the airplanes around me would probably be more of a hassle for him. When I was on the beach in Los Angeles, the airplanes were landing and taking off one right after another. Kalamazoo wasn't so busy; when I flew in that direction I usually didn't see a whole lot of airplanes over there, but it would still probably be a hassle for him.
But I kept in my mind that I ought to ask Mister Salvatore if I could go to the airport and meet the airplane directors. Maybe on a day when the grumpy man wasn't working.
I followed the train tracks west for a while, then turned around and went back to campus, taking a shortcut across Western Michigan University. There were some students on the streets already, and a few of them pointed up at me. If there hadn't been so many, I would have flown down a bit closer, but I told myself I didn't have time anyway.
Breakfast wasn't anything special, just cereal and toast with jam. Christine said that she liked it when I ate toast because watching me lick the stray jam off my muzzle brightened up her day.
That brought a smile to my face, 'cause it's always good to make someone else happy.
After we turned in our math homework, we started learning about synergies. That was pretty easy to understand; that was like how the tribes worked together. We brought the rain and the earth ponies grew the crops and we both benefited from it. They couldn't grow as many crops without us, and we didn't have as good food without them, so with us working together there was enough extra food to feed all three tribes. He also talked about interference, which is pretty much the opposite thing, and is also called asynchronous, which means not in synchrony.
Then he built on that with feedback loops and non-equilibrium. I knew what both of those were, too, because both were really important in the weather.
Class felt like it got over really quick, because it was the perfect mix of things I already knew, and new vocabulary like asynchronous which I hadn't known in English but now I did. It's strange how many ways there are to make words opposites. It would be simpler if it was linear and not linear, synchronous and not synchronous and so on. I had to cross off some of my notes and put the right word in.
I had toast with jam for lunch, too. Being in heat sometimes messes up my appetite and I don't find anything all that appealing. Not that lunch today had much going for it. I guess the kitchen staff had decided they felt lazy today, too, because there were hamburgers, sandwiches, mashed potatoes, some limp, overcooked beans, and what they called buffalo wings, but I didn't think that they actually came from buffalo, 'cause I'd never seen one with wings, and human animals were a lot more plain than Equestrian animals. Whatever they were, they smelled disgusting.
Sean told me that the buffalo wings were probably chicken wings that didn't get eaten last night, coated in sauce and offered to us again. He said that whenever people didn't eat something, they'd either add sauce to it and try again, or else make soup out of it.
We turned in our essays in anthropology and then Professor Amy started off the class by telling us that she was looking forward to reading our assignments, and a boy in back said that she was going to be disappointed, and everyone got a good laugh out of that.
Then she started us off by explaining what we needed to know to be good cultural anthropologists. She explained cultural relativism, and said that it was important for us to be both a participant and an observer, and that we had to be able to speak the language and learn the customs. Then she said that it was important not to be ethnocentric, which meant putting your tribe in the center.
We had to keep open minds; nothing can be judged wrong just because it's different. A bunch of people raised their hands all at once when she said that, and rather than call on anybody, she repeated that nothing can be judged wrong just because it's different. She pointed to the boy in the back of class who had said that she would be disappointed in our essays and said that we couldn't say he was wrong just because he was wearing a hat and nobody else in class was. She said that we couldn't even say he was wrong for supporting the Chicago Bears. What we could do, and should do, is ask him why he wore the hat and why the Bears rather than some other team.
Then she handed out notecards and told us all to write our names on them and then think of one question that we really wanted to ask the person next to us about their culture or their clothes or something else, but to keep it clean. She gave us a few minutes to think of something we wanted to ask, which was good because it was actually kind of hard to come up with a good question to ask that wasn't too personal. I barely knew the girl sitting next to me. Her name was Rachel and she had dark hair and wore dark clothes all the time and first I was going to ask about that, but then I remembered that she had a small tattoo the back of her left hand and I was kind of curious about that, so I wanted to know what it meant.
I didn't get my answer, though. Professor Amy took all our cards and mixed them up and said that she was going to go around the classroom in order and she would ask each person a question on the card and we had to answer even if the question didn't make sense: we had to pretend that it applied to us.
There were some chuckles at some of the answers, but everyone gave pretty good answers.
Then she said that we should think about our answers—we'd all come up with a way to answer the question that had been posed, and even though the question might not have made any sense to us, we could justify it somehow. She said that other cultures have their way of justifying the things that they do, and that we needed to understand what their reason was before we rushed to judge them. And she'd really been paying attention to who had answered what, because she used some of us as examples, like how I'd said that I wore boots because I spent so much time in the sky that my hooves were soft.
She told us that our next class was going to be a bit easier, because we were going to talk about sports. Then she said that before we did, we had an assignment, which was to find one thing that somebody who was a member of a different group than us did, and then find out why they did it. She said that since she was feeling nice, it wouldn't be due until Friday. And she said that she didn't want a personal question, but a group question. She said that since she was thinking of sports, it would be okay to ask a Packers fan why they wore cheese hats, but it wouldn't be okay to ask why one particular person liked the Packers. She told us that if we were unsure about our question to send her a computer letter or stop by her office and she would decide if it was a suitable question.
Sean had been right in his prediction: they had buffalo wing soup which nobody seemed interested in. He said that he thought the dining hall was in collusion with the Quad Stop, and when sales there were slow they came up with two meals of bad leftovers in a row to get us to eat down there. I said that he wasn't being creative enough, and that I'd found plenty to eat and it wasn't their fault he didn't like salads.
He said that they needed another pizza day, and I thought that would be nice, too. Maybe we'd have one tomorrow.
I sent Aric a telephone telegram saying that it was a nice night out and I wanted to fly to Durak, but then afterward I'd ride home with him, and he said that was okay. So when it was seven, I put on my flight gear and flew out there. I had to be careful because there were so many wires that crossed the streets and I knew where it was safe to fly around campus but it was a little bit more difficult in downtown—I stayed well above the treetops because wires didn't go that high, but when I came in to land there were a lot of them to dodge. I was glad that I hadn't tried it after dark.
Playing Durak was always fun, no matter what happens. Everyone there talks and laughs a lot, and some people always have interesting stuff to say. And there are a couple of people who have bad strategies, like Mandy who comes sometimes and just grabs a card as quickly as it goes on the table so that she won’t get all that many, or Aric who likes to beat the first thing he’s given, even if he wastes some good trumps that way, and Keith who sometimes fishes for good cards by trying to beat a low card with a really high one in the hopes he’ll get more of them for later.
When the game was over, I got in Winston and watched him closely as he drove back to his house. Then we took our turns in the bathroom, and when I got in his room he had gotten undressed already but he was sitting at his computer and I thought about climbing up in his lap but then he wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing, so I started teasing him with my wingtip instead, and it didn’t take very long before he stopped using the computer.
"Then she said that it was important not to be ethnocentric, which meant putting your tribe in the center."
Will Silver Glow learn that lesson and not be so pegasuscentric?
I can't remember if Silver's ever asked Aric to share a shower with her. If she hasn't, I'm kind of surprised considering your story before this one,
A thought: Could Silver just turn in an edited version of her journal as a final essay for anthropology? It's got a lot of interesting observations on humanity at this point, and an evolving viewpoint.
My religion does not recognize this first scenario. I am a militant Anti-Mondayist.
Apparently Silver's view is that earth and pegasus ponies are synergetic and unicorns are parasitic. Or maybe commensal, on a good day.
Because Unicorns can write easier than other tribes, they probably get most government jobs. Canterlot seems to be mainly Unicorns. This doesn't make them beloved.
Earth Ponies seem to get mostly crap jobs. It's not the law, it just works out that way. Odd, that. (There are exceptions, like Octavia). So it's not prejudice. They can succeed if they want to. They are happier doing manual labor -they like hard work.
And here we see that Silver is both very like a cat, and much better than a cat. She can be very distracting when she wants attention, but is considerate enough to not outright block someone from what they're doing at the moment.
Also, buffalo wing soup sounds very disgusting.
Well, that's what happens when you steal vocabulary from every language in arm's reach.
I quite like Amy's teaching methods thus far. I'd love to hear who got posed the pony question and how they answered.
As for buffalo wing soup... I'm actually kind of intrigued by the concept, but I doubt it would work well with actual buffalo wings.
However, I realise that Silver's use of "and it was the last ones I had" may simply be ideomatic in her usage, like Applejack saying something like them's good eatin' or somesuch.
7266522 Who told you that those kinds of jobs are crap?
They are the most important jobs, the ones that have to be done before anything else can be done. If nobody grew food you would starve. If nobody maintained the sewers, you'd get a disease and die.
That they are looked down upon and the people who do them are not properly valued speaks more to the flaws of society than anything else. Success is keeping everybody alive in the first place, so they can go do the trivial nonsense they consider more important than that.
This reminds me of all the BS in anthropology class I had to do. I am fine with and liked learning about other cultures. What I disagreed about was not comparing it to your own and discussing the merits of the culture.
Such true words. Thank you for the smile.
Amusingly enough, this is litteraly what asynchronous means: not synchronous.
7266655 Of course! Science's goal is to observe and describe. It deal with fact. Anthropology is about saying how humanity is and why.
You can use the work made by anthropologist to pass judgement, but you are out of the field covered by science, you enter the domain of subjective judgement.
Oh my god I want this to happen now
"Hi Mr. Grumpy Radio guy!"
an other Garfield fan
>I thought that maybe I could offer to fly to the airport and buzz the tower.
>ftfy
why would this be still importante when he has silver on his lap ?
i mean they could watch dirty videos online together ... if silver is into this
KB-BOY. I grew up in a really small town. I've worked on farms. It is boring, back breaking, Ill paid Hard Work from dawn to dark 7 days a week. Yes, it is important. No, you do not see college grads lining up to do it no matter how bad the economy gets. It is hard to get illegal immigrants to do it.
Heinlein said "any society that values bad philosophy over good plumbing is in trouble. Neither their pipes nor their philosophy will hold water."
Depending on the airport, visiting the tower should be pretty easy you just need to ask. Next time she get's someone who seems to like her on the radio ask if she could come up and see the tower. If it's not to busy they would probably be okay with it (at least that was the case at my airport).
I was certain that her radio and flashing lights were rechargeable, needing to be plugged in overnight. I hope she isn't discarding LiPos just because they're empty. A charger must have been included when she got them.
It begins
Buffalo wing soup? Where do you get such ideas?! Chicken wings are mostly skin and bone, but they're pretty good when they're fried and dunked in sauce because that way you can pretend the skin is meat... Taking that and boiling it would turn the fried skin into greasy gelatinous ooze...
Then you could add hot sauce and rice, and call it Jambalaya.
7267762
....... Okay, wasn't going to before, but now I HAVE to google buffalo wing soup.
I have decided that I shall henceforth refer to texts as telephone telegrams.
7268318 The best greek symbol is obviously Mu.
7268361 Yes, as I stated earlier there is still some scent. If I remember well, it is mainly beacause our hormonal level are affecting our sweat's scent. But don't quote me on that one.
7266394 Calling it now, she'll try to be less ponycentric, but since she isn't around other ponies that often it won't occur to her to be less pegacentric.
It seems like shes getting into the idea of the Go-kart thing. Most of the Go-kart tracks i've seen around where I live have karts that aren't really built with tails in mind. Meaning they may have some objection to her driving one due to it possibly getting caught on/in something.
7268408
... they strap you in. i'm not hoping for a burning wreck, just a low speed into a wall or a spinout. More for freaking her out than anything damaging.
7268318
it's all greek. With a few exceptions, it's all context dependence or arbitrary use.
7268441 I've always like lowercase mu. script nu is nice looking as well. I think my favorite is psi though.
7266959 And that's why America is a country world famous for both major infrastructural failures and a downright anti-human political life.
Silver Glow isn't Luna in disguise, is she?
Can't abide wings. Or crawfish. Too messy.
7266394
Maybe?
probably not
7266398
That story clearly said that sex belonged in the bedroom, backyard, or the alley behind Donut Joe's.
Silver Glow likes flying or trotting around the neighborhood before taking her shower, and she usually does that after leaving Aric's house. That's why she hasn't thought of it yet.
7266401
Yes, she probably could. Or if not as a final essay, as extra credit points. That would be the kind of thing that Professor Amy would love to read.
7266444
The worst time is weeks were you have Monday off (like this week), and then Tuesday feels like Monday, and it kind of is and kind of isn't, and you spend the whole rest of the week off-kilter.
7266458
Seriously, now that they don't raise the sun anymore, what purpose do unicorns serve in society?
7266522
By their nature, they are also probably more rules-oriented. A good unicorn is slightly OCD, and that's just the quality you want in a government worker.
The real question is if they consider them crap jobs. Of all the Mane 6, I'd say that Applejack is the only character who has achieved exactly what she wants in life. Everypony else is still chasing their dream--and this isn't a new thing; she's had it since episode 1.
img08.deviantart.net/3549/i/2012/147/1/6/applejack__asleep_on_the_job_by_kas92-d51c3l0.png
7266534
Ponies are basically cats with manners.
Yes, it does.
7266655
I think in the most academic sense, an anthropologist is supposed to be a neutral observer. I'm not saying that there isn't a time or a place for discussing what's been observed, because of course there is, but when out in the field, the anthropologist ought to just observe and report.
7266732
You're welcome!
Thanks to my one computer science class, I usually write not (whatever) as ! (whatever).
And I used to live with a vet, so we adapted shorthand from each other. The whiteboard that we put tasks that needed to be done often had cryptic messages like "Δ fish H20."
7266741
7266782
That's a good way to get your pilot's license revoked.
It probably wouldn't, but she's polite enough to not want to distract him.
Sooner or later she's going to get to see human porn. Which will probably wind up being really weird for all involved. "Wait, the pizza delivery guy will also have sex with you if you ask?"
7266959
I can't claim farm work on my resume, but I've driven wrecker, worked in restaurants, and worked in factories, and all of those jobs are important and not many of them have big fat paychecks, and often enough the working conditions are miserable or worse. But somebody's got to do it.
7267202
I'm not sure what the regs are these days. I've been in the tower at Jackson, MI, years ago. Do they still let just anyone up there, or do you need some kind of special clearance first?
7267439
Radio's rechargeable, flashing light isn't.
7267545
7267762
From eating college food. They never actually had buffalo wing soup, but only because when I went to college, buffalo wings weren't popular in Michigan yet.
7267797
I'm sure that you also found as I did that there are legit recipes. But I think the important lesson is just because you can doesn't mean you should.
7268294
Do it
As an aside, because of The Simpsons, I now always answer the phone "Ahoy, ahoy."
7268441
It must be, because it'll come up in tomorrow's math lesson.
7268526
That's a very good guess.
7268541
The way you phrased that makes it sound like in other places go karts are built with tails in mind.
There are ways to keep a tail from being a hazard, but they might not be comfortable for her.
7268814
I know that, but the mental image of Silver Glow flying free of her burning and then exploding go kart is just too good to let go.
7269036
And that's why America is a country world famous for both major infrastructural failures and a downright anti-human political life.
Our infrastructure is fine. On average it's a good C-, or maybe a D+, and that's a passing grade.
Why, the 20,000 volt wire in front of our shop has only fallen down twice in the last five years, which is a pretty good record, right?
7269045
No . . . why would you think she was?
7270992
I have never tried crawfish, and if I never do I don't think it will be any great loss.
7267202 Hey, I recognize you! You're in the Ponyfinder Campaign Setting book!
That would brighten anyone's day.
7271153
Crawdads are yummy fresh-water lobsters.
7445566
I don't like lobster, so. . . .
7268828
Don't get me started on people who think Aleph is a greek letter.
7271141
There are many horror stories of the infamous "Action Park" in New Jersey. Among them, that the go karts had speed limiters, but drunken guests bribed employees to disable them, or the drunken employees themselves disabled them and took them out on the regular highway after-hours.
7283303
Right up until the inevitable heart attack. . . .
7554619
At first thought--like if you asked me cold if Aleph was Greek, I'd probably say yes. If I had a moment to think, though, I'd get it right.
I've heard--and this is probably not exaggeration--that it was the most dangerous amusement park in the US.
7720974
The other alternative, of course, is finding herself worshipped as a god, and the next anthropologist getting to try and explain why there are pegasus images all over the village.
If you've read it, much like the isolated village with the square chickens that Uncle Scrooge visited.
*unicorns benefited from it
Here they turn it into a stew and add rice.
Left over steak, steamed veg, and soup? Stew.
Left over curry and rice? Stew.
Left over stew? Stew.
7727899
Square chickens? Do you not mean... spherical chickens?
Just want to slap that teacher trying to say Cultural Relativism is a good thing. You can use her line of logic to justify any atrocities in a society because, "well that's just their culture". And judging from her Packers question, she's most likely a collectivist too.
7747249
Only if they knew how to grow crops, or liked playing in the rain.
He said that whenever people didn't eat something, they'd either add sauce to it and try again, or else make soup out of it.
ooh, adding rice. Now that's getting creative.
Nope, square chickens. You know, the ones that lay square eggs?
justdisney.com/store/img-large/disney-don-rosa-original-art-hand-drawn-donald-duck-scrooge-return-plain-awful_282159129403.jpg
7749938
You can, but you're not supposed to. In its purest form, cultural anthropologists are supposed to go into a new culture with a totally blank mind and simply learn their culture and then later on report back what you found; you're not supposed to be looking at it through a lens of your own culture, and the assumption that everything you see is inferior to the modern, Western way of thinking.
I don't think that cultural relativism is meant to be a way to justify, say, atrocities, but more as a way to put aside your biases at leastwhile you are making your observations. Understand the culture, and don't try to force it to fit your expectations.
To give an example, an alien visitor to the US might discover the high number of deaths caused by guns, and possibly be horrified by that. How could we do that? Do we not understand that guns can kill? Why are we trusting people with them? But if they stay in our culture and observe, they might understand that we as a society have chosen to value individual liberties and the amendments, and so now you recognize that for Americans, at least, there's the dichotomy between freedom and safety. [Granted, this is oversimplified, but whatever]
7749938 it's like look i know that the tribe over the river sacrifices every third child because they think it makes the rain come faster. But it's all relative so don't be ethnocentric