//------------------------------//
// April 4 [buffalo wing soup] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
//------------------------------//

 April 4 

Some Mondays I wake up ready to go and other Mondays I wake up wishing it wasn't Monday. This was the second kind of Monday.

Lying in bed and thinking about how miserable a morning is doesn't make things better, though. So I got up a bit reluctantly and put on my vest and the thought that I was about to fly cheered me up even though I had to put new batteries in my blinking light and it was the last ones I had. I should have thought of that yesterday at Meijer.

The grumpy man was on the radio again and he was even grumpier than normal and I thought that maybe I could offer to fly to the airport and give him a hug, but having to re-order the airplanes around me would probably be more of a hassle for him. When I was on the beach in Los Angeles, the airplanes were landing and taking off one right after another. Kalamazoo wasn't so busy; when I flew in that direction I usually didn't see a whole lot of airplanes over there, but it would still probably be a hassle for him.

But I kept in my mind that I ought to ask Mister Salvatore if I could go to the airport and meet the airplane directors. Maybe on a day when the grumpy man wasn't working.

I followed the train tracks west for a while, then turned around and went back to campus, taking a shortcut across Western Michigan University. There were some students on the streets already, and a few of them pointed up at me. If there hadn't been so many, I would have flown down a bit closer, but I told myself I didn't have time anyway.

Breakfast wasn't anything special, just cereal and toast with jam. Christine said that she liked it when I ate toast because watching me lick the stray jam off my muzzle brightened up her day.

That brought a smile to my face, 'cause it's always good to make someone else happy.

After we turned in our math homework, we started learning about synergies. That was pretty easy to understand; that was like how the tribes worked together. We brought the rain and the earth ponies grew the crops and we both benefited from it. They couldn't grow as many crops without us, and we didn't have as good food without them, so with us working together there was enough extra food to feed all three tribes. He also talked about interference, which is pretty much the opposite thing, and is also called asynchronous, which means not in synchrony.

Then he built on that with feedback loops and non-equilibrium. I knew what both of those were, too, because both were really important in the weather.

Class felt like it got over really quick, because it was the perfect mix of things I already knew, and new vocabulary like asynchronous which I hadn't known in English but now I did. It's strange how many ways there are to make words opposites. It would be simpler if it was linear and not linear, synchronous and not synchronous and so on. I had to cross off some of my notes and put the right word in.

I had toast with jam for lunch, too. Being in heat sometimes messes up my appetite and I don't find anything all that appealing. Not that lunch today had much going for it. I guess the kitchen staff had decided they felt lazy today, too, because there were hamburgers, sandwiches, mashed potatoes, some limp, overcooked beans, and what they called buffalo wings, but I didn't think that they actually came from buffalo, 'cause I'd never seen one with wings, and human animals were a lot more plain than Equestrian animals. Whatever they were, they smelled disgusting.

Sean told me that the buffalo wings were probably chicken wings that didn't get eaten last night, coated in sauce and offered to us again. He said that whenever people didn't eat something, they'd either add sauce to it and try again, or else make soup out of it.

We turned in our essays in anthropology and then Professor Amy started off the class by telling us that she was looking forward to reading our assignments, and a boy in back said that she was going to be disappointed, and everyone got a good laugh out of that.

Then she started us off by explaining what we needed to know to be good cultural anthropologists. She explained cultural relativism, and said that it was important for us to be both a participant and an observer, and that we had to be able to speak the language and learn the customs. Then she said that it was important not to be ethnocentric, which meant putting your tribe in the center.

We had to keep open minds; nothing can be judged wrong just because it's different. A bunch of people raised their hands all at once when she said that, and rather than call on anybody, she repeated that nothing can be judged wrong just because it's different. She pointed to the boy in the back of class who had said that she would be disappointed in our essays and said that we couldn't say he was wrong just because he was wearing a hat and nobody else in class was. She said that we couldn't even say he was wrong for supporting the Chicago Bears. What we could do, and should do, is ask him why he wore the hat and why the Bears rather than some other team.

Then she handed out notecards and told us all to write our names on them and then think of one question that we really wanted to ask the person next to us about their culture or their clothes or something else, but to keep it clean. She gave us a few minutes to think of something we wanted to ask, which was good because it was actually kind of hard to come up with a good question to ask that wasn't too personal. I barely knew the girl sitting next to me. Her name was Rachel and she had dark hair and wore dark clothes all the time and first I was going to ask about that, but then I remembered that she had a small tattoo the back of her left hand and I was kind of curious about that, so I wanted to know what it meant.

I didn't get my answer, though. Professor Amy took all our cards and mixed them up and said that she was going to go around the classroom in order and she would ask each person a question on the card and we had to answer even if the question didn't make sense: we had to pretend that it applied to us.

There were some chuckles at some of the answers, but everyone gave pretty good answers.

Then she said that we should think about our answers—we'd all come up with a way to answer the question that had been posed, and even though the question might not have made any sense to us, we could justify it somehow. She said that other cultures have their way of justifying the things that they do, and that we needed to understand what their reason was before we rushed to judge them. And she'd really been paying attention to who had answered what, because she used some of us as examples, like how I'd said that I wore boots because I spent so much time in the sky that my hooves were soft.

She told us that our next class was going to be a bit easier, because we were going to talk about sports. Then she said that before we did, we had an assignment, which was to find one thing that somebody who was a member of a different group than us did, and then find out why they did it. She said that since she was feeling nice, it wouldn't be due until Friday. And she said that she didn't want a personal question, but a group question. She said that since she was thinking of sports, it would be okay to ask a Packers fan why they wore cheese hats, but it wouldn't be okay to ask why one particular person liked the Packers. She told us that if we were unsure about our question to send her a computer letter or stop by her office and she would decide if it was a suitable question.

Sean had been right in his prediction: they had buffalo wing soup which nobody seemed interested in. He said that he thought the dining hall was in collusion with the Quad Stop, and when sales there were slow they came up with two meals of bad leftovers in a row to get us to eat down there. I said that he wasn't being creative enough, and that I'd found plenty to eat and it wasn't their fault he didn't like salads.

He said that they needed another pizza day, and I thought that would be nice, too. Maybe we'd have one tomorrow.

I sent Aric a telephone telegram saying that it was a nice night out and I wanted to fly to Durak, but then afterward I'd ride home with him, and he said that was okay. So when it was seven, I put on my flight gear and flew out there. I had to be careful because there were so many wires that crossed the streets and I knew where it was safe to fly around campus but it was a little bit more difficult in downtown—I stayed well above the treetops because wires didn't go that high, but when I came in to land there were a lot of them to dodge. I was glad that I hadn't tried it after dark.

Playing Durak was always fun, no matter what happens. Everyone there talks and laughs a lot, and some people always have interesting stuff to say.  And there are a couple of people who have bad strategies, like Mandy who comes sometimes and just grabs a card as quickly as it goes on the table so that she won’t get all that many, or Aric who likes to beat the first thing he’s given, even if he wastes some good trumps that way, and Keith who sometimes fishes for good cards by trying to beat a low card with a really high one in the hopes he’ll get more of them for later.

When the game was over, I got in Winston and watched him closely as he drove back to his house.  Then we took our turns in the bathroom, and when I got in his room he had gotten undressed already but he was sitting at his computer and I thought about climbing up in his lap but then he wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing, so I started teasing him with my wingtip instead, and it didn’t take very long before he stopped using the computer.