Silver Glow's Journal

by Admiral Biscuit


March 28 [First Day of Spring Semester]

 March 28 

Waking up to the first day of a new semester felt odd. On one hoof, I was going back to how things had been before vacation, with classes and eating in the dining hall and everything, but my classes were different, and so were everybody else's.

I hadn't thought about everybody else at first. I got on my gear and took off for a morning flight. The grumpy man was on the radio again, but even he was a bit more cheerful than usual. Maybe it was the nice weather, or maybe he missed me.

I got in a good flight around downtown. It's kind of fun to follow the streets and pretend that I'm a car: I have to remind myself not to cut corners, 'cause I'm above the buildings and could do that, but that would be cheating.

Sometimes if the traffic lights aren't in the car's favor, I can stay ahead of it. Other times it gets all green lights and I can't keep up.

It would be funner to fly lower, but there are all sorts of dangerous wires that cross the road. Some of them look thick enough to land on—birds do, and squirrels sometimes run along them, their little bushy tails flipping from side to side for balance—but I was told that it was way too dangerous for me. All of us pegasuses were shown a movie made by Golden State Power and Light showing two wires stuck into the end of a tube of meat humans call hot dogs and then turned on, which made the hot dog explode. They said that the same thing would happen to us if we touched any of the wires or landed on the poles.

Obviously squirrels and birds don't watch those movies.

I'd worked up a pretty good lather by the time I'd had two 'races' through town. I lost both because the traffic lights were against me.

Then when I got back to my room, Peggy was gone, and when I went into the bathroom somebody was already in the shower. I wasn't later than normal—and then I remembered that it was a new semester, and probably everyone else also had a new schedule.

I thought it was Peggy, but I wasn't certain. There were so many different smells in the bathroom it was hard to be really sure, so even though I thought about flying up and sticking my head over the top of the shower cubicle to see, I didn't. I just knocked on the door.

It wasn't Peggy, it was Ruth. I said that I needed to take a shower 'cause I was all lathered up from my exercise and she said 'you snooze you lose,' and I said that I hadn't been snoozing, I'd been flying. She laughed and said that she'd be done soon and I should just be patient. So I sat on the little bench on the wall and was patient until she was done and then I really had to hurry and didn't get much more done than rinsing the sweat out of my coat before I had to dash off to breakfast. I wish humans weren't so weird about sharing showers.

I got to my first class a little bit early—I thought it might take me longer than it did to find the room. It was in the Olds-Upton building, which is the same building that my climate science class had been in, but this room was on a different floor than that one had been.

It was pretty much the same inside. I picked a seat where I was close to the front and could also see the door so that I could watch people as they came in and see if there was anyone who I was friends with in the class. I hoped there would be. I hadn't thought about how all the students in the class were going to change, too, which meant that I might have to make some new friends.

I got lucky in this class, though: both Keith and Sean were taking it, and they both sat next to me. Keith leaned over and asked me what a nice pony like me was doing in a class like this, and I stuck my tongue out at him.

The professor came in before the whole class had gotten seated and just stood up front waiting until five minutes after class should have started, when one last student came in through the door. He said that there was always one.

He started by taking attendance, and then he said that since he now knew all our names it was time that we learn his, which was Gurkiran Banerjee, and if we had trouble pronouncing it we could just call him 'sir' or 'doctor', or if we were trying to get in his good graces, 'doctor sir.'

That got a good laugh around the classroom, and he began his introduction to the class. It was kind of hard to understand him because he had an unfamiliar accent, and his voice had a sort of lilt to it, almost like listening to a zebra, but he didn't rhyme.

After a bit, though, I got used to it and I could make sense of him. I'd noticed that some of my friends had slightly different accents, and it was a lot more pronounced with Trevor and his friends (especially Leon, but he did it on purpose because it helped his street cred).

We didn't get a whole lot of actual classwork done, because he just covered some of the most basic basic things, and how we were going to be graded at the end of the semester, and then he gave us a quiz that didn't count for any points at all just to see what we knew.

It was all pretty simple multiple-choice questions, except for the last one which asked who the most handsome man in the class was and I could choose between the professor or the closest man to my right or left, or none of the above and I chose none of the above, but when we went over the answers he said that anyone who answered anything other than 'the professor' failed the class automatically, and my ears fell but then he said that he was only kidding.

When class was over, he stood by the door and shook everyone's hand and thanked them for coming, which I thought was a little odd. And he asked me to stay behind for a minute. So I sat back down and waited for everyone else to leave and then he turned and sat down next to me and asked me if I was sure that I was ready for this class. He said that he wasn't going to give me any slack just because I was a pony, and that made me kind of mad. I told him that I had expected it to be hard, but I thought I was smart enough to figure it out and I didn't think he ought to be telling me what I should or should not do.

That kind of backed him down, and he said that he didn't mean to be offensive or condescending, but that since I was from a completely different culture with a different understanding who spoke a different native language, that there might be some special challenges for me that the other students didn't face. And he told me that he had been born and raised in a city in India called Muzaffarpur, and his family had moved to America when he was in high school and it had taken him years to figure things out and he was still occasionally confused by America.

I felt bad, 'cause I'd thought that he was picking on me for being a pony, when really he was looking after my best interests although maybe not in the best way. I told him that I was sure I'd figure it out, and he said that if I needed any help understanding things, he'd be glad to help me.

I had lunch after that, and then went to my next class which was in Dewing. I got there early, but it didn't do me any good because there was another class in there already. I got a look at the early arrivers in the hall and there wasn't anybody that I knew very well, although a couple of people were familiar, like Melissa who had been in my poetry class, but there wasn't anybody who I knew really well.

We had to stand out of the way while the other class left, and when I could get in I picked a seat that was a little farther back than I would have liked but gave me a good view of anybody else coming in, but nobody I knew wound up coming in after all. It was funny; I'd sort of gotten the idea that the campus was small enough that I ought to know everybody by now and besides Melissa there were a few other people who looked familiar, but who I didn't know at all.

The professor was called Amy Cunningham, but she said that we could just call her Amy if we wanted to. Instead of taking attendance like Doctor Sir Banerjee had, she went around the class and asked each of us our names and where we were from. I just said Equestria, 'cause the cloud outpost where I'd been living didn't really have a name that I could easily translate into English. Some of the earth ponies who lived below jokingly called us 'North Chonamare,' because they said that on all their maps the north was always up, and when they looked up, there we were, clearly north of them. And one of my friends called it skyseaponytown, which sounds a lot better in Equestrian.

I'd never really noticed before how humans always wanted to have a strong sense of where they were from. They'd name the town where they'd lived, and if it wasn't an important town, they'd name one that was near it, so that someone who was familiar with geography would know exactly where they were from. And a lot of my friends from Michigan just pointed to their hand, because Michigan is shaped like a hand. (I wonder if there are any states shaped like a hoof?)

A girl called Madison was from a town called Climax which was near Kalamazoo, and that made a couple of people snicker. She just rolled her eyes.

After we'd all gotten done with our introductions, Professor Cunningham explained how the class would be graded and handed out a schedule that included what reading we ought to be doing throughout the quarter. Then she explained how cultural anthropology was the study of different human cultures.

I noticed on the schedule that she had assigned us some reading already, so we'd be starting the next class at a gallop.

At dinner, everybody talked about what they'd done over Spring Break and how they liked their classes so far. Christine had visited New Orleans which is a city in Louisiana that used to be underwater, and Joe had gone to Japan, and Sean had spent the entire week at home playing games and setting up a new website on the internet.

I thought about reading through some anthropology, but decided that I would have time to do that tomorrow, and I had promised Liz that I would read more of the Bible, so I went back to reading Joshua. I couldn't understand why they thought it was important to circumcise themselves, and I had to ask Peggy what exactly they were cutting off because my computer told me but I wasn't sure what a foreskin was. She showed me how to get pictures on the internet, and I looked at a bunch and  told her that Aric was circumcised she said that she really didn't need to know that. So I didn't ask her if her boyfriend was or not.

It said that they marched around Jericho and took the city, and they kept their word and saved Rahab and her kin.  Then they burned the city and all within it, and I was a little confused with how that was written because it almost sounded like that meant the people from Jericho, too.

They didn't capture Ai because they didn't follow God's instructions again. And that didn't go well for some of them, because Joshua found out that they had taken things that they should not have and killed them.

And then they took the city of Ai and killed everyone in it and destroyed the city. That felt to me like a bad thing to do, but if God had said it was okay? It was hard to wrap my head around. Surely there were people in the city who weren't bad, and who would be just as happy living with Joshua as their leader rather than their old king. And probably the people in Jericho would have, too.

I thought I ought to ask Liz about that. She would probably know the answer.

I had just finished the part where Joshua had gathered all the Israelites together and read all the rules that Moses had gotten from God when Aric knocked on our door and asked if I wanted to go play Durak, and of course I did so I hugged him and kissed him and we went together in Winston to the coffee shop.

Everyone there had stories about their Spring Breaks, too. Aric had picked up a crazy hitchhiker who told them stories about being a radio operator in Vietnam and then they had spent one night camping out in a cemetery near Muskegon. James and Elizabeth went to Miami Beach together, and said it was very nice. Seth said that he went to Cancun, which is in Mexico, and he said that it was fun to be the only sober one because girls lost all their inhibitions when they were drunk. Elizabeth said that wasn't true, and James started to say something and then her face got red and she gave him a death glare and he shut right up.

We played a couple of hands and I lost once because I forgot that Seth still had an ace of trump, and then Aric drove me to his house and we made up for a week apart.