March 11
Meghan was still snuggling me like I used to snuggle Albie. It was the best way to wake up, all wrapped up and safe in her arms.
I really wished that I didn't have to get up for class. But I did, so eventually I started flicking her leg with my tail until she woke up.
I gave her a kiss on the cheek before I left, and then darted over to my dorm room long enough to grab my flight outfit.
The nice lady was controlling airplanes today, and I asked her if I could stop by and meet her sometime. It would be nice to put a face to the voice.
She said that she might be able to work something out, and then gave me flight clearance, but warned me that there was a medical helicopter inbound for Bronson hospital and so I shouldn't fly north at all.
I told her I would look out for it and made extra sure that my strobe light was blinking brightly. I was curious about it; I hadn't seen any helicopters flying around before.
It was a good thing she warned me. I heard it coming, but I hadn't expected it to be so low. All the airplanes have to fly higher than I do, but the helicopter apparently doesn't.
I stopped my own flight and watched as it passed me by, heading towards the hospital. It dropped its nose down and descended like a normal airplane would, but then it stopped and went straight down until it was on the helipad.
Helipads are marked with a big letter H in a circle, and if I ever fly into an airport, that's where I'm supposed to land, too. I'm not supposed to land on a normal runway at all, except for when I’m training or if the airplane director specifically tells me to.
Climate science class was all review today. Everyone handed in their extra credit assignments, and the professor told me that I could grade them now if I wanted to, or take them back to my room and grade them there—as long as they were graded before the final exam, that was all he cared about.
Since I still had to do some more studying for the exam, I said I'd do it later, and sat down with Crystal Dawn and Luke.
It wasn't as fun as studying while cuddling and fondling, but I think we got through the material a bit faster.
When class was finally over, I took all the assignments back to my dorm room and set them on my desk where they'd be safe. I was really looking forward to what people had come up with; it was possible that they might have some solutions we'd never thought of. Airplanes making contrail-clouds was something we couldn't do, and maybe there were other things too.
Philosophy class started off with a bit of an argument, and the professor had to calm students down right away and remind them that we were only talking about philosophy, not how that philosophy had been applied historically.
She spent most of the class discussing Marx's economic philosophy. In its simplest form, it meant that a worker ought to be paid enough to feed, clothe, and house him for his day's labor. Then he went on to explain that to make any additional profit after that for the capitalist (who is the person who hires the worker, I think) is greedy, and is robbing the worker of the benefits of his work.
The problem I saw was that the needs of one are different than the needs of another. Some pegasi are perfectly happy floating around on a cloud wherever the wind blows them, eating wild plants and maybe earning a few bits here and there for treats. Other pegasi buy houses on the ground, or spend bits on dresses or at the bakery.
Plus some ponies have foals to care for, and others don't.
It seemed like Marx was saying that either everypony ought to be paid the same for the same amount of work, in which case a mare living simply and eating what nature provided was a greedy capitalist for having bits left over, or a mare with several foals would have to starve.
Or would they be paid according to need? So the single pony would make less than the pony with a family?
I thought that was a system which would cause nothing but resentment, and I started to get an idea that maybe Marx wasn't as clever as he thought he was. I guess that's why people were not enthusiastic about what he said.
But, I could also see the positive side of his argument. Yesterday, I'd learned from Trevor's friends about how their ancestors were enslaved, and that was to take their labor and make it into a profit for the white people while the black people got basically nothing, and that wasn't right, either.
It was really complicated to think about, and the professor's lecture was constantly interrupted by people raising their hands and asking questions about stuff.
I got the impression that economic theory is really, really complicated, and I'm glad that I don't have to think about it. I clear the weather and break up storms, and that's all I have to know. Someday I'll be in charge of weather over a whole sector, and then I'll have a lot more responsibility, and I'll be paid more because I have to do a lot more work even if it doesn't seem like it.
When she finished the lecture, there was almost a sigh of relief from the class, and from her too.
Lunch was leftovers, which meant that there was going to be a special dinner.
In Equestrian class, the professor put on a movie which was called Life in an Equestrian Town. It was weird for me to watch; the narrator (who was a pony) was trying to explain stuff to a human audience, but it was obvious that she hadn't spent any time with humans. So there were some places where she explained things as if a human would have no idea what it was, and other times when she glossed over things I'd learned from experience completely baffled humans.
I had already noticed that I tended to slow down my speech when I was speaking Equestrian to the class, but the narrator of the movie hadn't thought to do that, so my classmates were struggling to keep up with her.
Then when the movie was over, the professor reminded the class that there would be two parts to the final—a written part and a spoken part. I was going to help her with the spoken part.
It felt really weird leaving class, because that was my last class of the quarter, and I would never have those classes again. I had one final in each to prove what I'd learned, but that wouldn't be the same as a regular class.
It was hard to believe ten weeks had gone by that quickly.
Dinner was special. All the lights were dimmed (which Christine said made it look fancier) and there were table cloths and candles in little jars on every table. There were even cloth napkins for us, instead of the normal little fake-woven baskets full of paper ones.
And that was just the appearance of the place. They also had a lot of special meats, and a man in an all-white outfit with a poofy hat that looked kind of like a cauliflower to cut them for you. It felt rude to ignore him, so I had him cut me a very small piece of ham and also a very small piece of roast beef.
When I put my tray on the table, everyone looked at the meat on it and then looked at me and there was this huge feeling of anticipation.
I ate the ham first. I thought I'd probably like it more. It was salty and a bit chewy and at the time I didn't really think about where it came from so it was pretty good.
Then I ate the roast beef and it was a bit drier and had a somewhat caramel taste to it.
After that a lot of the tension was released, and Sean said that I was a real human now because I'd eaten meat (apparently fish isn't meat) and I told him that he'd only be a real pony when he took his clothes off and so he reached down and grabbed at the base of his shirt and Christine swatted his hand and told him that nobody wanted to see him naked.
Then he told her that wasn't what she'd said last night, and her face got red and she said that she meant at dinner.
Joe said 'that's what she said,' and everyone laughed but I didn't get why that was funny.
After dinner, I looked over the climate science assignment and discovered that the professor had also done one and turned it in.
I hadn't decided how to grade them yet. I didn't know anything about being a teacher or a professor, and I didn't want to give anyone bad marks because they weren't clear on how things worked. It was probably my fault anyway for not explaining it well enough. Sometimes I took for granted the stuff I'd learned as a filly that was maybe not so obvious to a human.
So I just wrote in my notebook what each student (and the professor) had got right and what they'd got wrong, and I decided I'd sleep on how to grade them.
Maybe I'd come up with something tomorrow on the field trip.