June 1
I couldn't decide if I should wake up Aric or let him sleep. He'd probably get back to sleep after I left, but maybe he wouldn't, and then he might be mad that I got him up so early. On another hoof, he might also be mad if he woke up in a ponyless bed.
I didn't know what kind of schedule he had on Wednesdays, so I finally chose to leave a note on his desk for him, and then I went out the front door, because he couldn't close the window behind me if he was asleep and the way it was inset I didn't think that I could close it myself from outside.
While I waited to get permission to fly, I shook some more sunflower seeds out of the birdfeeder—it was getting kind of low, so hopefully he'd put more food in it soon, or else the birds would be disappointed.
There were scattered clouds up in the sky, and they were low enough I could reach them. They were clearing out, evaporating, so I knew that nobody would miss one. I spent my whole flight time fighting with it, getting it to bend to my will, and then I grabbed it and flew it back to campus. I sort of had a idea of seeing how long I could keep it together . . . I guess without knowing where I'd be living, I was acting out a nesting instinct.
In Equestria, there were almost always a few loose clouds in the sky, because the weather teams always had extras, and it was a nice thing to let them go so that any wandering pegasus who needed a place to land for a bit had something. But on Earth, there were days when there weren't any clouds at all.
I left it by my window, but when I got up to my room it had already drifted off, and when I looked for it it was stuck on a tree.
I was just thinking that I couldn't leave it there when Peggy came back from her shower and asked what I was looking at, and so I told her that my cloud was floating away, and asked her if she had any rope. Maybe I could tie it above the trees.
She asked if that was some sort of pegasus saying, and I told her that I had an actual cloud which I'd put outside the room but that it was stuck in a tree right now and she put her face right up against the window and then looked at me and said that there was a cloud stuck in the tree, and that she would be right back.
I was still looking outside, trying to see if there was somewhere I could tie it that nobody would mess with it (because I wasn't sure what happened to humans that touched clouds, but I knew that sometimes we got hit with lightning if the cloud was charged) and I saw Peggy down on the front sidewalk in her bathrobe, taking pictures with her telephone.
Well, I knew that I should have thought my plan through better, so I went downstairs too and flew up into the tree and pulled the cloud back out, then I lifted it high enough that it wouldn't get stuck on any more trees, and set it on its way.
I thought about it more while I was in the shower, but there wasn't anywhere that I could really put a cloud that it wouldn't get away while I was in class. Sometimes I come up with pretty clever ideas in the shower, but not this time.
There were no waffles again, but there was the little table with omelets, and so I got one and then when I got to the table and sat down Peggy started telling everyone how I'd gotten the cloud stuck and showed them pictures and I said that if I'd had the right kind of rope I could have tied it to the top of a tree and it probably would have stayed there. Sean said that we ought to find the right kind of rope, because the idea of a cloud tied to a tree was too good to pass up.
I told him that I didn't know what kind of rope was best (it wasn't very often that anyone tried to tie a cloud to something) but I did know that if you were going to the ground you had to use a rope with some copper in it. Sean said that he didn't think that anyone made a rope like that, then Peggy said that she bet some of the makers could and maybe that would be a fun project which could distract people from finals.
I thought that to make it last, there would have to be a bunch of experimentation to find the right kind of rope and what you could tie it to and what the weather was like and if trees and buildings behaved differently when they had a cloud attached, and I didn't think that it would be likely to last for too long, but they were all so enthusiastic about the project that by the end of breakfast I'd promised that if they got a rope, I'd get a cloud and we'd tie it to a tree and see what happened.
Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee told us that a matrix times a circle equals an ellipse, and then he explained the theorem that proved it. Then he started drawing out matrixes and having us solve the eigenvalues and the vectors so we could see it for ourselves, then he tricked us by making a matrix where the ellipse expanded on its first iteration,but then shrank because the value was less than one.
There was a bit of argument about that, which was silly; obviously Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee knew what would happen in his example. And he told us that we should numerically do iterations and see how it changes because that would be a good exercise for us.
He finished by explaining how to characterize a chaotic orbit, and explained how we could do that using its fractal dimensions, which let us take a pretty irregular graph and break it into parts, and when he gave us the equation he showed us one way to do it, and then said that it was more efficient sometimes to write it as a logarithm.
It got a lot more complicated when it was three dimensional (he'd been using a two-dimensional chaotic orbit as an example). He gave us a formula which could help calculate that fairly simply, and at the end of it it made a graph which indicated how chaotic it was.
I thought it was kind of funny at the end of all of it, you could show how chaotic something was with a straight line.
Lunch wasn't very good today—it was leftovers from last night, mostly. I hoped that meant that we were going to have a special dinner again.
Professor Amy got us together in our groups, and she handed each group a packet of papers which were previous observations from an anthropologist and were based on observations of the Waziri Tribe.
Our first assignment was to go through what had been observed before and draw what conclusions we could from the materials, find any biases the early observers might have had, and then plan out how we intended to meet with them.
It was a lot of fun. Rachel said that she was pretty sure that the Waziris weren't real—she said it sounded like something from a comic book—and I thought about the weather for New Atlantis that we were supposed to figure out weather for.
For once, my inexperience in a subject helped our group. Hunter, who had been in the last group, too, said that the Waziri had the same attitude towards cattle as the Xhosa. Rachel asked him how he knew that, and he said that he had studied them in a high school class, and then I said what if the imaginary person who had made the observations had also studied the Xhosa and was only seeing what he wanted to see. And Rachel said she thought that was possible, so maybe we ought to verify by observation and by asking questions about what they thought.
At the end of class, we turned in our group notes—that was all that Amy wanted—and I stayed late to show her my essay, and get her final approval before I finished it.
She said it was pretty good and that she was happy that I had taken her suggestions to heart. And she said that she'd noticed that I was getting better at English writing than I had been at the very beginning of class, and asked if I'd been practicing. So I told her that I was keeping a journal and had already filled up one notebook and almost another.
I probably should have worked on my essay more after class so that I could be done with it and not have to worry about it while I was studying for my math final, but when we were in class it had started to rain and there hadn't been any rain during the day in so long that I decided to go fly around in it and play in puddles instead. That might not have been the wisest way to spend an afternoon, but it was a fun way.
I took a really quick shower to rinse the mud off my legs, and then checked my computer mailbox. I'd gotten a letter from Mister Salvatore saying that they had found me a few possible apartments and that we could look at them tomorrow after class if I wanted to but he needed to know soon, and I saw by the date that he had sent it yesterday and I hadn't checked because I was a bad pony.
While I was writing a letter back, my telephone rang and it was Miss Cherilyn, and she wanted to know if I'd gotten the computer letter and I said I had, and they said that they would meet me tomorrow after Conrad's class.
Even though we had already made arrangements, I finished up the letter anyway, since it would be rude to ignore it, and I also sent another to Liz, saying that I might miss our talk because I was going to be looking at apartments so I would have somewhere to live that wouldn't drift away in the wind. Then I went to the dining hall.
They had the worst dinner I've had yet—everyone at the table was complaining about it, and I'd noticed that the lettuce wasn't very fresh. Sean thought that either they were saving up for the most epic dinner ever tomorrow, and Christine said that they'd probably run out of food for us and were just looking in the back of the coolers to get what was left.
Joe said that he didn't care; his mind was already on the summer and on moving to Japan, and he hadn't noticed the food in the last week.
I said that we ought to have a get-together before everyone leaves, and Christine said that was a good idea, and as long as her roommates didn't object too loudly we could do it in her suite on Saturday night.
It was going to be sad when everyone was gone.
After dinner, I finished up my essay, and gave it to Peggy to read to make sure that I hadn't made any dumb mistakes. English has a lot of words which sound alike but mean something different, and sometimes it's hard to know which one to use. And my computer isn't always smart enough to know, either.
In exchange, I looked over her math homework for her, which I thought was a pretty fair trade, and she did too.
She was getting pretty good and I told her if she kept studying over the summer she might be ready for nonlinear dynamics in the fall. She said that her idea of summer vacation didn't involve math at all.
That was kind of strange to me—why take a class if you're not going to use the knowledge as much as you can, and practice at it until you get better? But I suppose maybe that was a human thing.
I gave her a nuzzle before I went to Aric's house. I didn't like the thought of her leaving and going back home—she'd always been there for me when I needed her. I was going to have to do a lot of adjusting over the summer.
Aric was on the couch with David and Angela, and they were watching a movie called Black Dog. David said it was a movie about driving big trucks, but the more I watched, the more I thought it was about how not to drive them, because they were crashing and exploding a lot. But then things kind of calmed down until the very end, when two trucks raced each other, crashing into almost everything that was in the way, and one of them got hit by a train and exploded.
I wanted to know if that really happened, because I'd seen a couple of cars that had crashed into each other once, and it didn't look like either of them had exploded, and David said that that only happened with big trucks. He said cars were too small to explode, but trucks weren't.
When we were up in the bedroom, I asked Aric if he ever worried when he was driving on the road that a truck might explode, and he told me that David had just been making a joke; all the big explosions were because a lot of people liked seeing them in movies but that that normally didn't happen. He said that even fires after accidents were really rare.
He could have said that downstairs. I probably looked like a fool listening to everything that David claimed.
Then he sat down on the bed and asked me why I'd left without waking him up, and I said that I'd had sex with him but he must have been too tired to remember. He didn't believe me at all, so I told him to get undressed and I'd show him what I'd done.
Afterwards, he asked me how he'd slept through all that, and I shrugged and said that he must be a very sound sleeper.