January 26
I got up later than I meant to, because I was up too late playing Durak. I had to kind of rush my morning routine, and I didn't get to trot as far as I wanted to and I didn't get to fly at all. I can't quite put a hoof on when it happened, but it feels like my schedule is shifting to match the human's schedule, which is go to bed late and get up late.
Maybe human universities are better suited to thestrals.
It doesn't help that I sometimes have to wait to use the shower in the morning. It would be so much more practical to be able to share. Especially since some girls (and I'm not naming names) feel the need to groom themselves in there before coming out, which takes even more time.
Speaking of grooming, I probably ought to have a manecut soon, and maybe get my tail trimmed a little bit too. It's a touch long for all the walking I'm doing lately. I wonder where you go to get that done here? I don't remember seeing any spas. There certainly weren't any on campus, 'cause I'd been just about everywhere.
I have made the most important discovery in the dining hall. There is an electric waffle iron! It's kind of out of the way, which is why I didn't see it before. I thought that all the food was mostly prepared, besides stuff like toast, which you have to make yourself in an electric machine that takes the bread on a little conveyor and it goes into the machine and comes out toasted.
I asked Christine if the waffle iron was out all the time, and she said it usually was, but it was away from all the other food, and not so easy to find unless you were looking for it.
Then I asked her if it had been there since the beginning of the year, and she said it hadn't. She thought it was probably broken; she said that sometimes people put stupid things in it and it breaks. She also said that the same thing happens to the microwaves in dorms like mine.
Since I didn't know how one works, she told me she'd show me the next time I came by her dorm room. I asked her why she needed it, when there was the dining hall and you could use the telephone to get pizza as well, and she said that it was really convenient for all sorts of things like popcorn and hot chocolate.
She asked me if I was thinking of doing any extracurricular activities, and I told her I hadn't really decided yet. We knew it was an option, but a lot of times it got really complicated, and most ponies didn't bother. There was enough stress with trying to fit in and learn about new stuff. She said that was probably true, but I might meet a new friend, and maybe I'd discover something else that I liked to do. She also said that with a lot of stuff, there wasn't a really big commitment; I could do it if I wanted to, and then quit if I didn't like it.
I told her I had considered the track and field team: I'm a decent runner, but not as good as an Earth pony. I'd probably do all right in sprints and hurdles, even if I wasn't allowed to actually fly.
She said she wasn't really thinking of organized sports, although that was a good idea as well, then she asked me how I felt about role playing.
Well, I'd tried that a couple of times, but it was always a bit weird. Some stallions have really odd tastes, and it was hard to get in the mood when he kept calling me 'Momma.'
She said that she was into LARPing; from her description it sounded like a lot of fun, so I told her that I'd be willing to give it a try next time she was going to do it.
Then in poetry class, we moved on to a new poet, who was called e e cummings.
I was baffled by the first poem. When I looked at it, it was like he didn't really know how words are formed, or sentences are made.
I think if I had just read the poems in my book by myself, I would have passed them by after the first or maybe the second if I was feeling generous. In the bathroom, there is a message on the stall that says “I know the brownie batter blizzard secret,” and that made more sense to me than the first of his poems that I read before class started.
But then Professor Hillberry read it, and that made all the difference.
We have never imagined poems like this.
This was like a
This was like when you've got the sky all properly covered and suddenly a fallstreak opens up. I realized that there was more to words than just the rules, that you could make every single letter and punctuation mark be important on its own. I'd been confused (and a little annoyed as well) and I suddenly understood that he was doing more with less.
The professor had a student read another poem, and then he asked us what we thought about it. I raised my hoof, and he called on me right away.
I told him that I thought that poems weren't like novels; that a poem doesn't try to paint an exact picture, but rather lets you feel in yourself what the poet felt when shehe was looking at something or feeling something, and that it was okay for a poem to change its meaning depending on the circumstance. I told him I thought he'd been trying to show us that poems were sometimes held back by rhythm or meter, but that they didn't have to be; they could be whatever they wanted to be.
He said that I was right, and then he told me that I ought to look through e e cummings poems and see if there was one that particularly spoke to me, and read it for class on Thursday.
Then he gave a lecture on how all sorts of art styles were changing when e e cummings was alive, and how the people of the time rejected a lot of the old styles in favor of new and different styles.
Sometimes change is good. It's too easy to get caught up in a rut and keep doing things the way you've always been doing them, because it's easy.
But sometimes it's better to move beyond what you know and do something else. If I stuck with what was easy, I'd still be back in Equestria. Maybe I'd be reading stories in newspapers about how strange humans are and I'd be shaking my head and pushing clouds and not thinking too much about it. I think a lot of ponies would be.
It's not all good, though. Sometimes the old way was better and the new way is dumb. So it's not practical to just gallop off after every new thing.
That got me to wondering if I had made the right choice. I was far away from all my old friends, and I'd just recently discovered that not only were there dangers like cars that would run you over or airplanes that might sneak up on you in the clouds, or even like Miss Cherilyn said boys who would put roofies in your drink, but there were also angry men who might be upset at you just for being yourself, and it was easier to just go back to the familiar herd and not risk those dangers.
From that perspective, I'd made a stupid choice. I ought to have stayed in Equestria.
But then I thought about all the new stuff I'd learned, and we weren't even five weeks into the school year. I thought of the places I'd been so far, and the things I'd seen, and the people I'd met, and I realized I wouldn't want to trade it for anything. So what if some asshole in a suit spit at me and Peggy? He didn't matter. He was gone, and good riddance. He'd probably sulked back to his home; maybe he thought he was a big stallion, but he wasn't at all because I was still here, and he couldn't change that.
I spent the whole rest of the afternoon reading e e cummings, and after dinner as well.
Humanity i love you.