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// May 11 [Anthropology Test] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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May 11 

When I woke up I nuzzled Meghan until she woke up too and then I kissed her on the forehead and said that I was going to go flying 'cause I was nervous about the test coming up and she hugged me and wished me good luck, and then I quietly let myself out because Amy was still asleep.

I kept the grumpy man's words in mind when I asked for my flight clearance, and I stayed low over Kalamazoo until I was west of town, across the 131 Highway. Then I got permission to fly higher and did some peaks and troughs until I was a little bit tired, so I hovered at my last peak, told the airplane directors that I was going to go down again, and then did a big dive and pulled out into a glide and made it most of the way back to campus hardly flapping my wings at all.

Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee introduced us to fractals, and he started off by explaining how all the geometric shapes we studied were the idealized shapes, and that reminded me of Plato and his forms.  

He explained how functions for curved lines were idealized lines, and if you looked really closely at the line it was actually straight there, and I raised my hoof and said that ancient pegasi had considered a circle to be a polygon with a hundred forty-four sides and that was how they approximated the circumference and volume of it, and he said that humans had done something similar before they’d discovered pi.

A man named Benoit Mandelbrot had discovered the fractal nature of things when he discussed measuring the coastline of England, which is an island, and his discovery was that the shorter a measuring stick you used, the longer the perimeter got, because you were measuring smaller and smaller variations.  Islands and coastlines are very bumpy and irregular.  I don’t know why he wanted to measure it, because it’s how big it is, but humans like making measurements of things, so I guess that was important to him. And so it turned out that the coastline of England is infinitely long, if you use a small enough measuring stick, yet it encloses a finite area.

By the extension of this principle, you could imagine drawing a big, ideal rectangle around England, and of course you would know the area of that rectangle,  But then inside that would be England with its infinite coastline, and you would therefore have an infinite line contained inside a non-infinite space.

I kinda ate a light lunch, because I was worried about my anthropology test. It was funny; Peggy worried about math tests but they were less stressful to me because the rules of math were really straightforward and there was a right answer and a wrong answer and that was that. But in classes like Anthropology there wasn't a clear right or wrong, and so you sort of had to guess at what was the best answer.

I suppose poetry is like that, too, but Conrad seems more interested in what the poem says to us rather than what the poet meant to say.

Like she'd done with some of her other assignments, the test was about a made-up tribe of people, and we had to use the observations that she had given us and come to conclusions from that. And some of the stuff was really hard to figure out, because she hadn't given us any definite answers. I guess that's what it would be like in real life: if you were just watching you might not know for sure.

I was pretty frazzled by the end of class. I'd had to read over the information she'd given us several times to sort of tease out the information I wanted, and I wasn't sure by the end of it that I was right. But I thought she'd be happier with an honest attempt, so when I wasn't certain about something, I'd decided that I would offer other observations which might help to get at the root of the matter, because that seemed like something that she would be in favor of.

I talked to Rachel a little bit after class was over. She'd found the test really difficult, too, and she said that when she'd gone into Anthropology she'd thought it would be an easy class but that it had turned out not to be at all. So I asked her what she meant by that and she said that in order to graduate students had to take certain classes which were outside of their majors and minors and a lot of people picked classes which they thought would be easy if it was a subject that they weren't that interested in.

Well, my first reaction was that that was silly; what was the point in being required to take a class that you weren't interested in? But then I got to thinking about it more and I wondered if maybe that wasn't smart after all because it would make people learn something that they might not have wanted to but which might be useful just the same. I know when I was a filly I didn't want to go to school at all because I could have been pushing clouds instead of going to class, but now that I was older and wiser, I knew that the mares that hadn't couldn't get beyond local supervisor because no matter how much they might know about the local weather from hooves-on work, they didn't understand the big picture.

And sometimes you didn't know the big picture right away, and you just had to trust that the ponies in charge were wiser than you. I hadn't known how difficult me flying made it for the airplane directors—I hadn't seen what they saw; I hadn't known that I didn't show up on their screens like all the other airplanes so they had to guess where I was and to be safe they had to make sure to keep airplanes away from where I might be, and some of them were cheerful about it and some of them were resentful for the extra work that I made.

But now that I knew better, I could make sure to make it easier for them.

So maybe there was stuff that would matter later but didn't matter now. Maybe Rachel would go on to look at life with slightly new eyes because she understood better how not everybody was the same. Different cultures and different tribes had different ways of looking at the world, and maybe it wasn't always the best way but it was the way that they knew and so we had to understand that before we could decide if they were right or wrong.

I was thinking about that a little bit as I studied more of my radio book. It was hard getting through some of it because it kept nagging at the back of my mind that I didn't need to know it, but then I thought that maybe somehow it might later on, so I studied and took the practice test and took notes and studied some more and took it again and I wasn't satisfied until I took it three times in a row and got a perfect score each time. And it wasn't because I remembered what the answers were, either; the computer kept changing the questions.

It felt like I had made some important discovery so I was in a pretty good mood when I went to dinner, and on my way out I stopped by the mail hut and got my mail. There was a letter from Gusty—I'd thought that she would have sent one back on the computer, but she hadn't. So back at my room I opened it and the first thing I saw was a newspaper clipping and it was a review of their play, and it had a very nice picture of her.

In the letter she said that the second weekend had gone very well and they had been sold out every show thanks to the review in the Chicago Tribune. And she thanked me for coming to see it and also said that they were going to be going to Stratford Ontario, not England but maybe if they did really well in Ontario they could go to England.

She said that the only downside had been that on Sunday after she had gone to check her computer mail she had gotten all kinds of invitations from other theatres and that she had been planning to go to California but now she wasn't so sure if that was the right choice.

So I showed the letter to Peggy and the newspaper clipping, too, and then I wrote her a letter back saying that I was proud of her and that she shouldn't make a decision right away but look into her heart and see what felt right to her.

Then I started my computer and sent a letter on it to Mister Salvatore to tell him that I was ready to take the radio test and then I made a couple of more dreamcatchers and read some more of the Bible and I probably should have started reading the book about World War One as well but I was starting to get sleepy, so I flew off to Aric's house instead with one of my new dreamcatchers for him.