//------------------------------//
// April 6 [limit cycles and football] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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 April 6 

Dreams are funny. I dreamed that I was flying across the ocean and it was a beautiful blue-green below me and then after a while I realized that there wasn't any end to it and there weren't any clouds to perch on either, but there was an albatross flying next to me and he said that he would show me the way to safety, and then I looked back down and instead of the ocean it was a grassland, and I landed and rolled in the grass, then I saw a giant serpent slithering towards me and I was all tangled up in grass stalks and couldn't get away.

When I woke up I was tangled in my covers, almost falling out of bed, and I was still a bit disoriented from my dream, so it took me a minute for everything to seem normal. It was comforting to see Peggy sleeping in her bed, lit up by the weird orangish light that humans like to use. It might have been easier for them to see in that light: I know some birds can see stuff that I can't. I've been told that there are little lines on flowers that are invisible to ponies which birds and butterflies and maybe even breezies can see.

I didn't really want to get out of bed because it was still the middle of the night, so I wriggled around on my bed (quietly so I wouldn't wake up Peggy) until I'd gotten myself free and then fluffed my pillow back into shape and kicked the covers back into position and then hooked my pillow between my forelegs and kind of hugged it while I lay my head on it. I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to get back to sleep right away, but I did.

The next time I woke up it was morning, and I headed out for a quick trot. I thought I'd go a different way than usual, so I went down past the Dow Science building and flew across the street because there were a lot of cars so it was safer to go over, then found myself flying over the iron fence surrounding the Mountain Home Cemetery, which is where dead people are buried. There are stones which say who is under them, and most important people have bigger ones. Some of them even had obelisks or statues, and they were probably very important.

It also has several roads that go around it, and those were fine roads for trotting on. It didn't seem like the kind of place that saw many cars driving around it, because it wasn't even wide enough for two cars to pass each other and there weren't any guide stripes on it and the curves were very sharp. But there was one car and it was at the other end driving around slowly so I thought that I would follow it.

It didn't take me too long to catch up to it, and when I got close I had to decide how I was going to get by it. I could have stayed behind, I suppose, but I wouldn't have gotten much exercise that way. I didn't want to be too close in front of it, though, in case it started to go faster and chased me. So I thought I might go back the way I'd came.

I had made much of another circuit of the cemetery when I heard a car behind me getting closer, so I politely got off the road and into the grass to give it room to get by, keeping one ear back on it so I knew where it was. As it got closer, I moved a little more to the side so that it wouldn't feel crowded or try to crowd me, and then it was right next to me and a man shouted out at me.

Well I jumped right up in the air because I didn't expect that, and pretty soon he was asking me what I was doing in here and why had I climbed the fence and was I up to no good. I said that I was getting exercise and I didn't know that the roads were special and you weren't supposed to be on them. Then he told me to get out of the cemetery because I was a nuisance and I wondered who he thought I was bothering besides himself, but I took off and flew straight back across Main Street and then I thought he might be following me, so I made a big turn over Grand Avenue and then flew towards the center of Kalamazoo, 'cause I could lose him there if he was after me.

I landed on top of a stack of parking lots next to the hotel and told myself I was being silly, he wasn't chasing me, and I should not have flown over the fence and should have read the signs that I had seen before near where the little cemetery road went onto Main Street.

Then I wondered if I wasn't supposed to have landed on the top parking lot, because I wasn't supposed to land on buildings unless I had permission first. So I left before anyone could see me and went back to campus, staying low because I didn't have my vest or my radio or my blinky light.

I went back around the south way, and up the slope by DeWaters, then crossed over the parking lot and neatly landed by the back door of Trowbridge, then made my way up the maze of steps to our dorm room.

In math, Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee talked about limit cycles and eigenvectors, stable and unstable manifolds, and different kinds of connections. He also said that sometimes they called the lines between the stable and unstable sections the separatrix, which I thought was a very nice name, but then he said that he preferred not to use the term, and he showed us an example of how as you changed mu, the system was an incoming spiral, or a circle, or an outgoing spiral. At first that was a bit confusing, then he put it all together and said how there was a stable oscillation between the incoming and outgoing spirals which was the limit cycle. Then he said that you could perturb it (which means poke it) and it would go to a different stable orbit.

That was the kind of thing I understood, because working weather was like that: we would perturb the system that was there until we got it to a different system, if we could. And he also explained how even our hearts worked like that, and other body functions as well, which was kind of neat. I'd never thought about that.

Professor Amy started off her class by showing us a disturbing movie about Balinese cockfighting, and then she explained what it represented: the cock was a symbol of manhood, and it was a way of relieving tension and aggression, and that it gave men a chance to strut around. I wanted to know why they didn't just hit each other with their dicks instead, because then there wouldn't be poor roosters having to fight so that their owner could feel proud of himself. A few girls laughed at that question, but I was being serious.

After that was over, she told us that she was going to show us a film of another sport that was very masculine, and that the men wore special uniforms that highlighted their masculine traits like broad shoulders. She said that the uniforms were supposed to be for protection, but that they were used as weapons, and then when she played the film it was a football game like the Super Bowl. So I was glad I was taking good notes, because Cedric and Leon both played football, and it was good to have a better understanding of the game.

There were some protests about how that wasn't the same thing, and then Rachel raised her hand and asked why the two quarterbacks didn't get on the field and hit each other with their dicks, and it was a few minutes before Professor Amy could bring the class back to order and I was sorry that I had opened my mouth because as an anthropologist we're supposed to observe and not judge.

Then she explained specialized jobs, and said that in a lot of cultures, the men wanted the more important jobs, while the women would take the boring jobs because they needed to be done, and I thought to myself that Equestria wasn't like that. Besides the Royal Guard, I couldn't think of any things that a mare couldn't or wouldn't do.

On my way to dinner I stopped by the mail hut and got my mail. There was a nice letter from Aquamarine, and since I had been bad about reading them right away, I sat down in one of the chairs in the main lounge and opened the letter and read it right there. Dinner could wait a few minutes.

She said that there was a draft horse show at the Pavilion this weekend and wondered if I might want to come see it, and she said that she was sorry she hadn't sent me a letter about it sooner and that it was okay if I sent her a computer letter back because it would probably take too long for the mail to arrive with my reply. And she said that Jenny said that I could stay with her if I wanted to.

I was just finishing reading when I noticed Christine and Sean sitting down across from me, and they were curious about the letter so I showed it to them. Of course they couldn't read it at all. Sean was really curious about the writing, so I explained to him how Equestrian worked, and he studied the letter and then had me read it out loud to both of them. I thought that was kind of weird, since they couldn't understand it at all, but they both were fascinated. Maybe I ought to talk in Equestrian more often.

Then at dinner, our conversation turned to different languages, and I found out that everyone at the table could speak at least a little bit of a foreign language. Peggy knew some German, Christine knew how to say a couple things in Creole, Joe was fluent in Japanese, and Sean could speak Klingon. That was kind of neat to hear all the different languages. Joe had a pen, so we wrote some stuff on napkins, too, and while the German and Creole used the same letters as English, the Japanese and Klingon had their own letters.

That inspired me for a topic for my Anthropology paper, ‘cause I hadn’t thought of anything else yet: I would ask Gusty why unicorns liked to use a different alphabet because maybe there was a better reason than they just didn’t want non-unicorns to be able to read what they write.

After dinner I wrote a letter back to Aquamarine and then had Peggy help me put it in the computer. I'd asked her if she wanted to come with me but she said that she already had plans for the weekend. Then she showed me how to buy train tickets on the computer. Figuring out the timetable was a bit difficult, but we found a train that left Friday night which would give me all day Saturday with Aquamarine. The only train we could find left early Sunday morning, so Peggy suggested the bus, which left in the evening. And it went the same place as the train, which was really convenient.

It would have been smarter to have figured out when I could go to Lansing first, to make sure that Aquamarine would be there to meet me, so I wrote her another quick letter with my schedule and Peggy put that in the computer too and sent it to her. 

And I wrote a letter to Gusty, too, saying that I was looking forward to seeing her in the play and that I was still waiting for word back from Mister Salvatore when we would be arriving, and then at the very end I told her about my Anthropology assignment and then since I’d seen Peggy do it a couple of times, I put the letter in the computer all by myself.


Then I thanked her for all her help and nuzzled her on the cheek and said that I was going to Aric's and that I would be back in the morning.