//------------------------------//
// May 25 [Agriculture] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
//------------------------------//

May 25 

For once Meghan woke before me. I opened my eyes and she wasn't in bed, then I heard the toilet flush and the sink running, and she came back out of the bathroom and climbed back in bed with me.

Meghan put her arm around my barrel and gently pulled me against her, which I didn't mind at all, and ran her hand along my belly and kissed my ear and then I felt her kind of go limp and I was pretty sure she was asleep again.

I put my hoof over her hand and dozed back off until her telephone alarm woke both of use up, and she had to let go of me so that she could turn it off.

When she rolled back my way, I turned towards her and tucked my head under her chin and let her pet my back until the alarm went off a second time, then we both got up.

I'd gotten a nice flight in yesterday, so instead of flying again, I trotted around for a little bit. There was a nice little triangle of grass where Academy Street curved and it smelled really nice this morning, so I went and rolled around it for a little bit, which it turned out was kind of a mistake because someone must have cut the grass not that long ago. But I shook most of it out of my coat and went on (and I did smell pretty nice).

I got back to the dorm on time this morning, and when Peggy came in from the shower I told her that I needed more shampoo. She started to say Walgreen's would have some, but then said that we could go to Meijer tonight after dinner and get some.

I wound up using the last of it by the time I was done with my shower, so I tossed the empty bottle in the little blue bin on my way out of the room.

That reminded me that I needed another trip to the spa. My mane and tail could use a trim, so I would have to ask Meghan about getting an appointment.

I really needed to get my hooves filed, too. The cement sidewalks hadn't been kind to them, and I'd started to feel a little pain in my left hind pastern when I was trotting. I don't know why, but that hoof always seemed to grow a bit uneven. Plus my hoof walls were really chipped and cracked.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee said he was going to tell us how to compress fractals, which I thought was going to be squishing them down like I did with clouds, but it wasn't. Well, it sort of was, because we were finding how to get to the attractor, which could be thought of as the nucleus of a cloud.

He showed us how to figure it out on a piece of coral, where we'd find the points that mapped to other points, and once you had the three of them it was pretty easy, because it just left you with six equations to solve.

Then he explained the compression more, and said how since all the parts were the same you only needed a few numbers to describe it, which was what he'd been saying in the last class, too, but it was worth repeating.

It was kind of funny to watch some people finally understand. And I didn't see how it was such a hard concept—hadn't all the poems in my poetry class been written with only twenty-six letters, because that's what the human alphabet has.

So on my way to lunch, I flew over to an oak tree and looked at its leaves and how they came out of the branch and thought about how you might write that as a fractal equation. And it would be repeated leaf by leaf, branch by branch, and pretty soon you'd have a whole tree, but the math-tree wouldn't have a squirrel in it that was angry at me for being too near his nest.

I stuck my tongue out at him and then flew off to the dining hall.

I told everyone at lunch about Aquamarine coming to visit. Peggy already knew, of course, but nobody else did.

Sean said that he didn't think the campus was big enough for two ponies, and Christine punched him in the shoulder and said that she wouldn't mind if a whole herd of ponies showed up on campus. Then Joe said that he welcomed his new pony overlords, which was a very strange thing to say.

Then they all wanted to know what we were planning to do for the weekend, and I said that I wanted for Aquamarine to meet Brianna but otherwise I didn't have any plans. I thought she'd like playing euchre with us, too.

So then everyone had suggestions, like to go to the Kalamazoo Valley Museum downtown or the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and Sean thought go-karts would be fun again, and also 'cause it was a holiday on Monday there would be a parade and that was something we should see.

I didn't mind suggestions, although I thought that maybe Aquamarine might be overwhelmed by it all. I kind of had gotten the sense that she wasn't fitting in as well as I was, 'cause as far as I knew she was only really friends with Jenny . . . but maybe I was wrong; maybe she just wasn't one for putting a lot of stuff in writing. Some ponies were like that. And she'd enjoyed the stuff we did on spring break.

I wonder if maybe it's harder to make friends when there are more people on campus?

Professor Amy said that today was our last regular class—that we'd spend three days next week in groups. That part made me kind of nervous, 'cause I hadn't been a good pony in the last group, since I'd been sick, and after the first day I'd only been able to participate on the computer, which wasn't the same as actually being there.

She said that we'd be in the same groups as before unless anyone thought that they couldn't work with the people they had earlier, and I was worried someone in my group was going to raise their hand and say that they didn't want to be in my group, but nobody did.

We talked about agriculture and specialization. That seemed kind of out of order after all the other stuff we'd talked about, but I trusted that Professor Amy knew what she was doing.

She explained the beginnings of agriculture, which was really interesting. I suppose earth ponies figured it out the same way, while we pegasuses were just flying around eating whatever we could find. And she explained how different cultures came up with different strategies, like how the Incas planted their crops at different levels since they lived in the mountains. Then she said that agriculture starts to bring about a gender gap, and that most societies chose males to be their warriors because males were more expendable. That was pretty logical; once a stallion gets you pregnant you don't need him anymore, and it was good that people had thought of that, too.

The drawback to moving to an agricultural society was that it also began to cause a wealth disparity, because there's only so much land, and you either have it or you don't. And that was also why people started to defend their land and make countries and stuff. If you were grazing and gathering, you'd go where the food was, but if you were growing it, the food was where you were, and you'd want to keep anybody else from stealing it.

Then she ended by saying that one of the drawbacks to modern agriculture was that there was a greater possibility of famine, because people were tied to the land, and if the crop didn't do well for whatever reason, than everybody might go hungry, and there was a greater risk of disease because there wasn't as much genetic diversity in seeds. She told us that the Irish Potato Famine had been caused by their staple crop becoming sick, and as a result a lot of people had starved, and those who could had moved away.

I was glad that people had managed to figure out how to avoid that problem. There had never been a lack of food at the dining hall, and the stores were stuffed full of food. No doubt going hungry was a distant memory to humans.

I met Peggy when she came back from her class, and we got in Cobalt and went to Meijer. We didn't have a whole lot of time, plus I still didn't feel all that comfortable in the store since there were so many people, but I did go through their fresh food area and admired all the different fruits and vegetables that they had sitting out. Then we got some beer and snack food for when Aquamarine was over, then went to the shampoo aisle and I got two bottles of Mane and Tail shampoo. I also saw some really cute butterfly hair clips and decided to get them, too. They were silver and had little jewels that Peggy said were fake, but they were still pretty.

We got back home in plenty of time for dinner, and I even had time to send Aric a telephone telegram asking for the pictures so that I could put them in a letter for my sister.

It was tacos again, and this time I'd learned my lesson about eating too many so even though I wanted to have a third, I didn't.

I took a little break from my essay and finished reading 1 Chronicles instead. Next, I'd start reading the World War 1 book, and find out what that was all about. The man at the Air Zoo had said that his father flew in the Second World War, so I guess it was a war that humans kept repeating for some reason, which meant it was worth learning about. I probably should have asked him about it, but I was enjoying listening to him repeat his father's stories, and he was having fun telling them.

I tried calculating out the equation for an oak leaf, and I thought I got pretty close. Then I tried to use the computer program that Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee had showed us, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work right and Peggy wasn’t much help. She said that she didn't even know what half the words on the page were.

Sean did, though. I called him and he came over with Christine, and while she and Peggy were talking, Sean showed me where to put my numbers, and pretty soon the program was drawing mutant oak leaves. But after working on my calculations for a bit I got one which sort of looked like a leaf. It was a lot harder than I'd thought it would be, and it wound up with extra little leaves in the center that didn't belong but if I recalculated probabilities I was pretty confident I could get rid of them.

Of course, I kind of forgot about going over to Aric's until it was pretty late. Christine said that she had the perfect excuse for me, so Sean sent the picture to Peggy's printer and made it make a copy, then told me to write the equation on the paper and he would be so impressed by the math he'd understand how I'd been distracted. She said that she'd played Dungeons and Dragons with him and he was bad at addition, so he probably wouldn't understand this at all.

That seemed kind of mean to me, but I did like she said, and he didn't even understand the first equation. But he didn't think I was being mean by showing him that; he thought it was pretty funny how smart I was and I told him that pegasuses invented calculus, and then the unicorns stole it from us. Well, they did improve it a little bit, too.

Aric wanted to know what we needed all that math for and I said it was really complicated to calculate weather requirements and the more efficiently you could do it, the fewer pegasuses you'd need on a team, or the more territory each one could cover. And if you were setting up counterstorms, it was important to not use too much or too little.

I could see that he wasn't really paying attention anymore, so I leaned over and unbuttoned his pants and that got his attention back.

He said that he had something to give me, and went out to Winston and brought a folder of me standing next to the airplanes, as well as one he'd taken when I was flying in the parking lot. I could see by my wing position it was when I was gliding, and he'd taken it when I was nearly overhead, so you could just see the sky above me.

I didn't want to put them in my flight vest right away, because they might get wrinkled when I put it on, so I set the envelope on his desk and put my radio on top of it so I'd be sure to have it in the morning. Then I finished unfastening Aric's pants and he wiggled his hips until they fell down, and he stepped out of them and said that if I could get his underwear off, too, I'd win a prize.