Silver Glow's Journal

by Admiral Biscuit


May 2 [a normal Monday]

May 2 

I got up at my usual time and got right into my flight gear. The nice lady on the radio said that she'd missed me and I told her I'd been sick but I was better now, and I got permission to fly. I reminded myself that I was going to see if I could come and visit her someday. Probably the easiest way to do it would be to ask Mister Salvatore to arrange it; she was always talking to other airplanes and that was a lot of responsibility that I shouldn't interrupt.

It was kind of chilly and overcast outside, and it smelled like it had rained not that long ago. Looking up at the clouds I figured that it would rain some more during the day, but probably not too much.

That was the kind of rain most ponies liked the least, and we'd learned in weather management classes how to avoid it. It was basically when you had just a little too much moisture to stay up, but not enough to sustain a good rain. Or sometimes you had different temperatures in the sky and the rain would fall but not make it all the way to the ground. Humans called that virga, and because they had uncontrolled weather with some really really high clouds it was a lot more common on Earth. We didn't really have a name for it, because it was usually a screw-up.

I wasn't going to let it dampen my spirits, though. I darted around right at the base of the cloud and listened for airplanes. I didn't know how thick the clouds were so I didn't want to try and fly through them.

I landed a bit later than I had intended to and I certainly didn't have time to send a computer letter to Mister Salvatore, so I just wrote a note to myself and put it on my desk so that I would see it and remember later. Then I got in the shower and it was kind of lonely, but it made me smile when I remembered how both Aquamarine and Cayenne had struggled getting over the edge of the bathtub while I could fly right over. And maybe in a couple of hours when Cayenne got up she would be soaping herself in the shower with her loofah and thinking how nice it was that she could just move it wherever she wanted with her telekinesis rather than have to struggle to get everything.

While I was preening, I plucked out some more stray feathers and put them on my desk so that they'd dry off before I went and added them to my collection. I'd lost a couple of primaries, which were big enough I could make a wall-sized dreamcatcher if I wanted to.

Everyone was happy to see me back at breakfast and in a good mood. I told them all about my weekend and how great Gusty had been in the play and that they were going to go an extra week because it was so good and then they were going to perform in Stratford and Joe asked me which one and I didn't know that there was more than one.

He said that there was one in Ontario that was pretty close and probably the one she was thinking of, or there was the original Stratford in England, and I said I would ask her next time I wrote her.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee reminded us about Poincaré sections, and explained how that simplified orbits by reducing one dimension and I'm glad that he reminded us because I hadn't been paying good enough attention on Friday when he first went over it. And he reminded us that we could only count piercings from one direction in that plane; the other ones didn't count.

He explained autonomous systems and non-autonomous systems, and explained how the state space of a non-autonomous system was on a cylinder, and rolled up the paper to show us how time zero and time 2π were the same thing, and it would repeat like that.

Then he gave another example of an electrical circuit, and I got completely lost because everyone in class understands exactly how electricity works, except for me. I don't understand how you can make little copper paths for it to follow without it jumping to other places, but that's how it works on Earth.

At lunch I decided that maybe I could educate myself some on electricity because Sean must know all about it because he knows about computers and everything inside works on electricity. But it turned out that as smart as he was he didn't know all that much about what kept the electricity on the right path; he just knew what it did when it got where it was going. Still, that was useful because he explained how logic gates worked and then used his pocket telephone to show me how a computer made out of dominos (not the pizza) could add numbers together.

Professor Amy taught us about social stratification. She said that privilege doesn't just mean that which is obvious, but all the unspoken rules which are what the social stratification causes.

She said that in egalitarian societies, everyone is born with an equal chance, and that most hunting and gather societies are like that. That was what pegasus societies are like; everypony is equal and it's what you accomplish that matters, not who your mother is.

In rank societies, there is a difference in prestige, which was based on how close you were to an important person. It occurred to me that was what unicorns like to do: they based their social status on how close they were to an important unicorn, which is why it was so important to them to keep track of all their ancestors, and that was a silly system because it could change arbitrarily. If Gusty wound up becoming an important actress, than all of a sudden her sisters would have more rank than they had had before, even though they hadn't done anything.

Imagine if we had such a silly system: my sister would suddenly be more important because I was the only pegasus with a pilot's license.

And there were a whole lot of other types of social standing, and they could vary from one place to another. One of the dumbest that humans liked to use was color, which was silly because they were all different colors and not even as colorful as ponies, and I couldn't see how it could make any difference at all what color they were.

Even the unicorns had more sense than that.

We had Italian food for dinner again but this time they had two different trays of ravioli, which is a little pasta sandwich. One had meat in it and one which didn't, which is the one I picked. And they also had all sorts of sauce and I tried some of the ravioli without it but it was too dry so I got some and decided I'd just be careful to keep it out of my muzzle.

Of course it was one thing to think that and another to actually do it but at least I entertained Christine, who would helpfully point out spots and then laugh when I licked them off.

Then Sean said he was kind of jealous of my tongue, and Christine went and got a cherry and plucked the stem off of it and worked it around in her mouth for a moment and stuck it back out and it had a knot in it. So I got a cherry and tried it for myself but I couldn't do it and she said it wasn't just how long your tongue was but how well you used it and both Peggy and I agreed with her.

I spent some of the evening reading the rest of Samuel, then I went over to Aric's early but he wasn't there, and I couldn't send a telegram to him because I had left my telephone back at my dorm room. So I let myself in with the key because I knew he wouldn't mind and I went up to his bedroom and found a book on his bookshelf which was called Letters from the Earth which made me think that Mister Twain didn't have a lot of use for God's rules.

I wonder if God got mad at him because of it?

I read until my eyelids got heavy and Aric still wasn't there so I stretched out on his bed and closed my eyes and hoped that he would be there in the morning.