//------------------------------// // September 23 [Birthday Party] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------//  September 23 When I woke up, I decided that I was going to fly north along the river for a little while to get my morning exercise, so I got my flight gear and filled up my camelback and then when I got out to the boardwalk it was cloudy and felt like it was going to rain, so I went back to our room and got my weather radio, too. And then I ate some hay and got my fishing license just in case I felt like catching some fish. I should remember to always take that when I was flying. I went back out to the boardwalk and told Dori where I was flying, and she warned me that it was going to rain, but probably not for a little while, and asked if I was going to be patrolling and I wasn't sure if I could, because of my classes. I would have to decide if it was a really bad storm—I think my professors would understand—but I couldn't just go up in any storm. So I flew down over the quad and followed the railroad tracks all the way to the river, and then I turned north. I stayed kind of high to begin with, because I knew that I'd be flying over the stinky shit-factory and I didn't want to start my day smelling it. A thousand feet up was enough that it was barely smellable, especially with the slight wind and the humid, almost-raining air, so when I was a ways past it I dove back down to be closer to the river and I thought about Mister Salvatore wanting to drift down the Mississippi. The Kalamazoo River wasn't as wide, but there weren't any big barges in it either, so maybe he could start here for practice. He'd eventually get to Lake Michigan, although he might have to go around some dams on his way, since there was at least one more downstream. When I got by the Nature Center, I climbed up a little bit and flew over the pasture there, and looked at the deer all nibbling at the grass. I wonder if some people feed them, too? It would be nice to look out your window in the morning and see deer snacking at your deer feeder. I flew all the way to a big island at a curve in the river, and then I decided that I would turn around and head back. I could have gone a little bit further and then taken a direct route back to campus, but I wanted to stay above the river. It felt like I was going faster on the way back, just because I was flying against the current. If I'd had all morning free, it would have been fun to fly all the way to Plainwell or Allegen, but I didn't have enough time before my class. Maybe I could do it on the weekend. When I got back to campus, I landed back on the boardwalk and went inside to take off my gear and take a shower. I couldn't exactly feel how soon the rain was gonna come, so when I was done with my shower I turned on my computer and looked at the maps and thought that it would be a few more hours before it got here. But I kept my weather radio on and put the rest of my flight gear into my saddlebags, just in case. Me and Peggy went to breakfast together and she was kind of yawny but had a couple of cups of coffee with her breakfast and that woke her up. She said that maybe she should try some morning exercise and I said that if she wanted to go trotting around the neighborhood with me I'd be happy to. I knew she could run 'cause she'd run in the race at the Nature Center with me. So she said maybe we could do that one day a week, and maybe Monday mornings would be the best, because it would motivate her to not stay awake so late on the weekend. And I asked if I could wake her up and she said that I could. Christine told her she was going to regret it, which was probably true. And Peggy asked if I had any plans for the weekend and I said that I didn't yet. So she told me to not make any for Saturday but wouldn't tell me why which was a little frustrating. I guess it makes people happy to surprise me with things. I flew across campus to the Dow building and landed a little ways back from the front doors, just so that I wouldn't accidentally crash into a student coming out, then went up and waited until it was time to go into the classroom. Lisa asked me why I had a radio strapped to my leg, and so I told her it was in case I needed to go stormwatching. Professor Brown started telling us about thermodynamic cycles, and he showed us equations to get Cv and Cp and that was really neat because instead of a math equation where there was one equal sign and parts of the equation on either side, he could use three equals signs for all the different equations where you changed the volume or the pressure and it would all work out and it took him a lot of writing on the markerboard to prove it but he did. And I heard Crystal whisper to Austin that he could just have showed us the relationship without doing all that but I thought that it was a lot smarter to show how he got it because then we'd understand the principles behind it rather than just be told that was the way it was. As he took us through the equations, he reminded us to start out by writing everything we knew down because that would always be helpful. And then after he'd gone through all his equations he asked us if T2 reversible was cooler than T2 irreversible and I remembered that work was smaller if it was irreversible so I thought it would probably be the same but I wasn't sure, and it turned out that I was wrong. When we came out of class, it was raining and I didn't know if it would get worse so I called Mel and there was a lot of static but he was out at our usual place, and he said that it didn't look like there were going to be any thunderstorms but probably just rain. Well, looking at the pictures wasn't the same as being there and feeling it, so I put on my gear in the lobby and asked for permission to fly, and I told Lisa that we'd have to meet later. It came down heavy at first and then calmed down and I had a chance to fly back to my dorm and snack on some hay and put my math homework in my bag so that I could keep in the air as long as possible. And I realized that I was going to miss going over it with Sean and I felt bad but we should have gotten together yesterday. I sent Peggy a telephone telegram to tell her why I was missing lunch and then I saw that I had a telegram from Mister Salvatore, too, but I didn't have time to see what it was, because it sounded like the rain and wind was picking up again, so I galloped down the hallway and glided down the stairs and was flying when I hit the door to the balcony. The little hissing arm on it didn't let it open as fast as I thought it would and I caught the end of my wing on it and broke a primary. It was always better to be up in the sky before the heavy rain came down, and I wasn't, so it was harder to get up to altitude and of course I couldn't see much of anything, but I could feel it, and the way the air currents were behaving. And I didn't feel a lot of charge in the air, which meant that the storm didn't have much electricity in it and probably wouldn't produce much lightning. I kept looking at my watch every time I reported to Mel, and I finally told him that I had to go to math, and he said it was okay because it was beginning to clear where he was. And I had to drop pretty low before I could see where I was and I'd drifted off to the east some, but not too much. My watch had helped keep me on station, and I landed on the quad right next to a big mud puddle. I couldn't shake off the water because it was raining hard enough it wouldn't have done me any good outside and it would be really rude to do it inside, so I pushed my mane back and out of my eyes and then went in and upstairs to my class. Sean was kind of surprised by how I was soaking wet and dripping all over my chair and he took off his sweatshirt and let me wear it even though I was going to get it wet. And he said that Peggy had told him I was up flying and also that I should turn off my blinking light 'cause it was kind of distracting. So I put that in my saddlebags and my radios, too, and got out my things for class, which was a little bit harder with his sweatshirt on. Professor Pampena told us to think of a line as the trajectory of a moving point, which was a parametric equation, which could be used to figure out if a line intersected a plane and where it intersected, and he gave us the equation of a plane and we had to figure out if his Q-line points were on the plane or went through it or never crossed it And since one equation solved as bigger and one solved as smaller, then they must be on opposite sides and go through it, which most people in the class figured out, and then he showed us how to calculate where it passed through the plane. Then he taught us about cycloids, which were things that moved on circles, but made arches along a graph, and how we could calculate where the point was and he showed us how to find it with vectors. He told us that we needed to use Taylor approximation to figure out what the point was doing right at the x-axis—which was the road—and I didn't know what that was and nobody else in the class remembered it, either, so he had to explain it, and how it showed that the point moved mostly down and then back up without moving much forward at all, and after we understood that he gave us all our homework. I hadn't done any of my physics homework and I still had to meet with Lisa, too. I thought that maybe Peggy was getting things ready for my party and I'd be in the way, so we went to Sean's room to do math homework because he said that Christine was probably helping, too. And I gave him back his sweatshirt, and he tossed it into a basket of dirty clothes. His roommate wasn't using his chair or his desk, so I sat there on a towel and Sean sat at his desk and we did our homework and I finished first and then nipped off my broken primary a little bit shorter, to neaten up the split end. And I had a bunch more feathers that really weren't where they ought to be, either, so I started preening my wings and I guess I got a little bit too focused on that 'cause I suddenly noticed that he was staring at me. I hadn't quite finished but it was good enough for now, so I got my math homework and pushed my chair over and we went over the problems together, and there were a couple that we hadn't gotten the same answer for so we both re-worked them and I'd gotten one wrong and he'd gotten one wrong. Even though I probably could have, it didn't seem right to stay in his room and do my thermodynamics homework, and I didn't have it with me anyway, so I went back to our room and Peggy wasn't there. I bet she was down in the lounge but I didn't stick my muzzle in to find out, 'cause I think she wanted to get everything set up before I arrived. And there were some bags on her bed that I was curious about but I didn't look inside; I just got my homework and I went outside and found a bench that was dry enough that I could work on it there. The bench had gotten warmer from the sun shining on it after the rainstorm, and it got even warmer from me stretching out on it and that was all thermodynamics. If I had been colder than the bench it would have warmed me up. I had to hold a hoof on my worksheet a couple of times 'cause every now and then a gust of wind would try to take it away. Since I was close to the front of the dorm, I could see when a pizza car arrived, and the driver brought a bunch of pizzas up to the front door and he must have been new because usually they went in the back. And I saw Peggy open the door for him and I bet that meant she was almost ready for me, so I packed up my homework and flew around to the boardwalk and took off my saddlebags and then noticed that I was still damp under them, and my coat was all matted, so I brushed my coat out. I thought it would be more fun to go in the front, so I flew around the dorm one more time and came in through the front door, and Peggy and Christine and Rebekka were all there and still hanging up some balloons and streamers on the wall. And there was a big stack of pizzas and a cake and some cupcakes and a brown grocery bag with a bow on the top of it. So they weren't quite ready yet but they didn't mind that I was there, and I helped hang up some of the streamers since they'd had to stand on a chair to do it. And then people started showing up, and it was just about all my friends. We ate pizza and talked and they had me open the bag and it was a big album with lots of pictures of everyone including me and Peggy said that humans had a thing called a yearbook that they used to remember school so they made me one and I could show all my friends back in Equestria. It was hard to even know where they'd found all the pictures. I guess that a lot of times people were talking pictures and I didn't even know it, 'cause there were a couple of me playing Durak and giving the girl at Val Day a ponyback ride, and some of me snowboarding and wearing all my flight gear and there were also lots of pictures of my friends either with me or doing things on their own, and it was just really amazing to see all of it. They must have gotten some from our helpers, because there was a picture of me flying over Lake Michigan with the skyscratchers in Chicago in front of me, and another picture of me sniffing a draft horse's nose. I was sure it must have been a lot of work to get all the pictures and put them in a book like that, and Peggy promised that they'd make a second one for me at the end of the year, because there was still a lot of time to do things. And she said that there were some pictures she hadn't been able to get either, and told me I should have told her it was my birthday sooner. Everyone had written in it, too; some of them had signed their names in the back and written under some of the pictures, too, and Peggy said that was also a thing that humans did for their friends. And since there were a lot of people and not everyone had seen all the pictures they all had to look at the book and it was kind of funny how I got questions from my friends about things that they didn't know I'd done, like how I'd had #freethenipple painted on my belly in Colorado Springs (Peggy said that she'd had to copy the picture from the internet). She also said that we were going to go skydiving tomorrow, in the afternoon, and that was something I was looking forward to. So after everyone had talked and gotten their chance to see the picture book, Peggy said that human birthday cakes have candles on them and it's usually one for how old they are, but she had run out of candles at sixteen so each one would have to measure more than a year, and I did the math real quick and told her how much time each one represented, and Sean gave me a hoofbump and said that I was a proper nerd. I had to make a wish and not tell anybody and then if I blew out all the candles maybe my wish would come true, and it was hard to think what the right thing to wish for was, but I finally figured it out and flapped my wings to blow out the candles and Peggy said that wasn't how you were supposed to do it but it probably counted. The cake was a nice, dark chocolate with a vanilla frosting and it was really good. The frosting was a little too sugary, but since it was my birthday it was okay. We all stayed in the lounge talking and we weren't supposed to be drinking but we did some anyway. Aric had brought a bunch of cans of beer and also paper cups with lids and bendy straws, and you could put the can inside and stick the straw through the lid and into the can and it looked like you were just drinking a soda (and there was also soda for people who didn't want to break the rules) and I think that probably the RA knew but never bothered us since we didn't get too loud. Once all the pizza and cake and cupcakes were all eaten, people started to go back to their rooms, and when almost everyone was gone we went up to our room and continued the party there and we didn't have to pretend with the paper cups any more. When it was getting close to bedtime, though, it got awkward because both Aric and Meghan were there and I couldn't decide who I ought to sleep with, because I couldn't choose both and I didn't want to hurt either of them so I didn't know what I should do, and I could tell both Aric and Meghan were waiting for me to decide and I just couldn't pick, and I finally went to pee to give myself some time to think and Peggy went with me and she said that she could maybe lie and tell them that we were doing something early in the morning so I didn't have to decide but that wasn't fair to them either. And I still hadn't thought of anything when I got back to our room and finally Aric said that he was going to give Angela and David a ride back home and that I was welcome to fly over if I wanted to after I'd said all my goodbyes, so I went out in the hall with him and hugged him and kissed him and I was pretty sure that he knew I wasn't going to be coming over tonight. Peggy said that it was okay if Meghan stayed in our room but the no sex rule applied when it was a girl, too, but I didn't mind, because I didn't really want to anyway, because it didn't feel right to me. Meghan had to go back to her room to get her sleeping clothes but promised that she'd be back, and when she'd left Peggy hugged me and said that she should have thought of that when she told people about my party but it wasn't her fault and her and Christine had told me and I hadn't listened to them when I should have, and maybe all three of us needed to have a talk about what we were expecting from each other. And it was kind of frustrating because there were other things that I did with one person and not another like go to the salon with Meghan or go watch plays with Aric, and even things that I did with other people that nobody got jealous about like stormwatching and math homework and it just wasn't fair. And I should have gone with Aric, 'cause I'd spent most of the summer with Meghan but it wasn't right to ration out the time with your friends like you'd measure out rain, either. So when Meghan came back in her sleeping clothes I think she could tell that I was kind of tense and she got into bed and I got in next to her and rested my head on her chest and I was still awake when she went to sleep and I didn't think I was going to sleep much at all.