March 8
I woke up on my regular schedule, which was nice. And I felt a lot better, too: I doubt it was just one night's sleep that had done it, but sleeping with a partner. I always get better sleep when there's someone with me.
I don't always get as much sleep, though.
Both of us were pretty well rested, so we had some fun before I left. It's weird; sex usually makes stallions and men (based on my trial size of one so far) want to fall asleep, but it energizes me. I've heard that some stallions won't do it before a race, 'cause they think it tires them out, but most of the mares I know are in favor.
It was overcast this morning; low leaden clouds that promised more snow. I flew up to their base and rolled on my back and skimmed my hooves through them, shaking loose a few nascent flakes which I followed down to Earth, watching as they formed into proper snowflakes, not the little snowballs that the snow machines at Boyne Mountain make. So what if these aren't as good for skiing and snowboarding on; they're prettier.
My leg joints were still achey from being magneted to the snowboard all weekend, but a lap of the neighborhood after I finished my flight mostly took care of that. All in all, at the end of my exercise I was pretty limbered up everywhere, and the hot shower was just a nice bonus.
Like I'd promised, I got the duffel bag with the GoPro and the memory cards and batteries to Gates on my way to breakfast. He said not to expect anything too quickly—there was a lot of footage for him to review and edit, and I told him that was okay.
He also told me that he'd tweaked the first video some and promised to send me a link to it. He was going to use it as an assignment for his film class, and that made me sorta puff up with pride, so I was even happier that he had more footage to work with. Nopony had ever wanted me to be in an important film before. I wasn't some showmare or starlet or famous athlete.
It was kind of bittersweet when I sat down in poetry class. I knew that we were about to start on the last poet of the quarter, and that would be that.
I'd kind of cheated and read a little bit of every poet in the books Conrad had recommended, trying to guess who he'd be choosing next; and as always, he surprised me with a poet named Langston Hughes.
He started out with a long poem called Freedom's Plow, and he had students in the class each read parts of it until we finally reached the end. But he did something a little different than what he had usually done; instead of handing out a pamphlet with the poems in them, he had only one copy, and we had to pass it from person to person as we read.
I liked that. It was more intimate, and we couldn't read ahead to know what was going to come next. Only our words, and then we passed it along.
We discussed that poem for half the class, and what it was about. Then he did something else new: he passed out a copy of the poem to everyone, and he had us read it again.
Then he took the poem back and put it on his desk and walked around front.
He reminded everyone in the class that today was the presidential primary in Michigan, and he said that he hoped that every one of us who could would vote. He was old, he told us, and it wasn't as much his America as it had once been. It was ours, or it soon would be, and we ought to determine its future.
Then he went back around his desk and pulled out a much-loved book. He turned it open and read us a poem called Harlem, and then told us to think about what he'd said and class was dismissed.
We all stayed in our seats until he actually walked out of the door, and even then it was a little bit before anybody else got up.
Back home, I had my favorite thinking spot. It wasn't much; just a jumble of rocks on a spit of land that jutted out into the ocean. One of them was big and flat, and I could sit on that and watch the waves roll in, or—if it was windy or really rainy—I could get a bit underneath and have some shelter from the weather, if I wanted it.
I didn't have that here, which was a shame. So I flew up to the roof of Dewing Hall instead: there's a big open area in the center which you can't see from the ground that has some machines and smokestacks and other stuff that humans put on roofs, but more importantly, it was completely invisible from the ground unless I walked to the very edge.
It wasn't the only building like that on campus—most of the class halls were similar—but Dewing was the highest except for the Dow Science building, and that one sometimes had funny smells coming out of its chimneys.
I landed up there and sat in the lee of a big metal machine and read through the poem several more times and then just sat there and thought about it, trying to wrap my head around it. It wasn't about a thing, like so many other poems we'd read had been. Or maybe it was, but it wasn't a thing that could be grasped or even seen.
I didn't have the words to describe how it made me feel, but it was both sad and hopeful at the same time, and I thought perhaps that was how it was meant to be.
I met up with Meghan and Lisa in Old Wells after lunch. I'd never been in it before; usually the doors were closed, because it was only used for special occasions, and I guess this was one of them. That was kind of a shame, the room was very beautiful, with an arched ceiling and a mural on the far wall, and big tall windows that let in lots of light, even on a cloudy kind of snowy day like today.
Everybody was gathered in little clusters, and every so often a student would come in and a dozen or so people would step out, and all the little clusters of people would rearrange, moving that much closer to the door.
Pretty soon it was our turn. All of us crowded into the van, and I had to stand in the little aisle because everybody else was taking a seat and the driver didn't want to leave one open for me because I couldn't vote. I didn't protest; it would be unfair of me to take someone else's space just because I was curious.
We drove through town until we came to a church, and the driver opened the doors and everyone got out and went inside, where there was another line.
Meghan told me as we were walking in that we weren't supposed to talk about candidates, and she also said that there would be sample ballots that I could look at and a poster on the wall that said what their rights and duties as voters were and she thought it would be educational for me to read them.
She also told me that it was rude to ask people who they had voted for; if they really wanted to say, they would. And she warned me that sometimes there were television crews and newspaper reporters at the exit who would ask who we had voted for.
Meghan got a little smile on her face and said that I should probably just tell them 'no comment,' but if I wanted to have some fun with them I ought to tell them that I had voted for Vermin Supreme because of his pony platform and then refuse to say anything else about it.
Then Lisa told her that if I did, it would probably backfire somehow. Meghan insisted that it would still be hilarious.
I read the posters and ballots like she had suggested, and then when they got to the registration desk I had to step aside because I wasn't allowed to go any further. But I watched as they got their ballot papers and took them into a little booth, then brought them back out and fed them into a machine.
It was very complicated: they had to go to one person and show their identification and a little card, then they had to give that card to another person who marked them off in a big book and gave them a ballot, then they filled out their ballot and before they could leave, they had to stop by another person.
Then we all had to wait outside until everyone was done, and then we rode in the van back to campus.
I ate dinner with them, because I hoped that Meghan and Lisa would explain more about it to me over food, and they did. They explained how different states had different rules, and in Michigan you could take whatever ballot you wanted, Democrat or Republican. She said that there were some people who voted for their favorite candidate, some people who voted for the one they felt was most likely to win, and others who voted against the one they liked the least.
After dinner was over, we went back to Old Wells, where they were showing results for the election on a big screen.
Even that was complicated: it took a while to get an official count, so the numbers were estimates at first, but their accuracy improved as the night went on, until the reporter decided that Trump and Sanders had won the race in Michigan.
There was both cheering and booing when that was announced. It was sort of like watching a hoofball match, both in how the audience reacted, and how the winners and losers of the primary both gave speeches.
People started leaving after that, some of them happy and some of them sad. I wanted to stay for longer, or maybe go and discuss it some more with Meghan and Lisa, but I knew that I would probably have a bunch of computer letters waiting from people in the climate science class who had more questions, and it turned out I wasn't wrong about that.
The only good news was that the professor had decided to move the due date back to Friday.