April 11
It was another gloomy day. Springtime in Kalamazoo didn't have too much going for it so far.
I got in a bit longer flight than usual, 'cause I got up a little bit earlier. I started off by just making big circles, stretching out my wings and relaxing my mind. It's easy to get in a kind of trance when flying, and you have to be careful that that doesn't happen. Most often it happens over the ocean, 'cause there isn't a whole lot to focus on. But it can be good, too, as long as you only let your mind drift a little bit and keep aware of what's around you.
Once I had cleared everything out of my mind but me and the sky, I started to do little hops up and down, then higher and higher. At the peak of every arc, I'd add a couple of flaps, then dive down and glide back up, until I was swinging through a couple of hundred feet of altitude at a time. Some of the ponies on my weather team thought that was one of the best ways to exercise, because you worked your wings then relaxed them. I wasn't so sure myself; you don't trot and glide to work your legs.
Even if it wasn't the best exercise routine, it was fun, and the repetitiveness of it helped keep my mind clear. I had to focus to keep at the same altitude at the bottom of my dives, and then to add just the right bit of speed at the very top.
When I decided I'd done enough, I did a backflip at the very peak instead of flapping and let myself fall backwards for a moment before twisting to hooves-down flight.
I hadn't buzzed the quad in a while, so I did that on my way back in. I came down steep over the roof of Hoben and leveled out just on the other side of the brick road, then shot across the quad and up the hill to Trowbridge, scaring a couple of students who ought to have been paying more attention at what was around them and a little less to their telephones. Then I banked hard around a tree and gained some altitude to bleed off speed. There were ways to do it at ground level, but it was tricky and you could strain a wing or crash if you didn't do it right.
My morning preening left me with three fewer feathers, and I could see where another one had fallen out in flight. Who knew where that had gone. Maybe somebody was going to find it on the ground and wonder what kind of bird had lost it.
Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee started by reminding us that in a dynamical system we ought to find the equilibrium points first, because that was where we had a good understanding of how the system worked. Then he put a problem on the markerboard, and had us help him calculate the Jacobian matrix and the eigenvalues, and explained how when r changed, the system went out of stability. Then he explained again how to calculate eigenvectors and eigenvalues on a flat surface, and how on a cubic place you had to calculate the eigenplane, too.
Sometimes there would be a system that when it went out of equilibrium it could go in two different directions, and sort of be in its own compartment (as he said), and those were called basins of attraction, and the stable points in them were called attractors. It got a little more complex because limit cycles counted as attractors, too, which wasn't the case in linear equations.
Besides having trouble with the math letters, writing neat matrixes was tricky, too. I wasn't the only one having trouble, though; a lot of the students seemed to be having difficulty comprehending a three-dimensional space, but of course that type of thought came natural to a pegasus. Although it's always difficult when you're looking at a representation of three dimensions of a flat surface.
I told everyone at lunch about my weekend with Aquamarine, but it was hard to get across how seeing the horses had made me feel. They were interested in the astronaut ice cream, though. Everyone at the table had had it when they were children. Sean said that it was never popular with astronauts, and that now they had real ice cream on the International Space Station. Although he admitted that that was a special treat for the astronauts; they didn't have ice cream all the time.
I didn’t know all that much about the space station so he told me about it and got some pictures of it on his telephone. He said that I could see it streaking across the sky from the ground, if I knew where to look, and said that his telephone kept track of when it was going to go by. He said that he could let me know when it was going to be close enough to see on a clear night, and that we could go out and look at it as it went by. I thought I could wave; maybe they'd see me. Then I realized I was being silly; I couldn't see people on the ground from the airplane for very long, and the space station was higher up than airplanes could go.
In anthropology, Professor Amy started off by talking about what we'd read about the Kayan women who put rings around their necks to make their necks look longer, and then she asked how many ways we could think of that people in America changed their bodies for religious or beauty purposes. She said that it had to be a permanent change, so things like dying hair or painting fingernails didn't count. Then there was a little debate about whether piercings counted, because they could grow back out. She said that they did count.
So the class together came up with a pretty long list of things that people in America did, and I said that I'd heard some zebra shamans wore neck rings, too, but I didn't think that they were trying to stretch their necks. And some ponies wore earrings, too, but not too many. There had been pegasus clans that notched their ears, but nopony did that any more—it had fallen out of fashion when my granddam was a filly. She said that back then you could tell where a pony had come from by the notches in her ears. It sounded painful to me: I'd had an ear bitten in a fight and it bled a lot and really hurt for days and days.
Then after that we talked about some ways that other cultures had changed their bodies in pursuit of beauty, and all of it was new to me. Some of it seemed simply horrible, like various ways that people had found to bind their bodies and make them grow in different, bad ways. I guess for humans sometimes not being able to move was a desirable trait, but I didn't see why. Not being able to move means that you might get eaten by a monster. Nopony would do that.
I spent some time in my room working on my poem, which wasn’t working out. I decided that I was overthinking it, and just needed to clear my head and let the words flow naturally, but that was hard to do when I was looking at a piece of paper that was all marked up from bad tries, so I filled the rest of the time by reading the next chapter of my anthropology book and then some of Samuel, which was the next book in the Bible.
I ate dinner in the dark room, and we spent an extra long time there before everyone went off to play Durach, and I went with them. On our way there, Aric came along in Winston, and he stopped on the road and asked if anybody wanted a ride, so we all got into the back of the truck and that was kind of fun. It was a little cramped and dark, because he still had the top on, but at the same time it was cozy, and there was a window that he opened between the truck and the top so that he could talk to us.
When we got there Keith pushed open the back window and lowered the tailboard, and then we all climbed out and went inside to play cards.
We rode back to campus in the same way, and after everyone had been dropped off, I got out of the back too and into the cab. I thought about asking him to stop by the dorm so that I could get my flight gear, but I didn't. I had gotten cozy against his side when we had pulled out of the parking lot and I didn't want to get out of the truck until it was time to go up to his bedroom.