June 3
Today was the last day of classes until the fall. I woke up feeling kind of edgy and unfocused, sort of adrift. It's the same kind of feeling I had sometimes when there was a big feral storm coming but we didn't know exactly when, so we'd push a bunch of clouds out and there'd be a pegasus or two on each one, and at least one of the weathermares getting telegrams and reporting cloud-to-cloud on the storm's progress.
The weird thing with feral storms was sometimes they died on their own, or veered away, so sometimes when we were put on alert, it was for nothing. Even though we knew that everypony would rather have no weather than a giant feral storm, it felt like a let-down when we sat on our clouds all day for nothing.
I wondered if the human weather people ever felt like that? Did they sometimes see storms on their radars that just faded away before they got to them?
I snuggled up against Meghan and closed my eyes, because I trusted her alarm to wake me up in time for class.
I didn't really fall back to sleep, but I was almost asleep enough that when her alarm went off I noticed that I had drooled on her shirt. I didn't think she'd be mad, 'cause she'd drooled on my foreleg.
She turned it off for a little bit and sat on her back so that I could rest on her chest. She had to move her telephone from one hand to the other so that she could rub along my back, and she scratched between my withers, which felt really good.
We got up after the second time the alarm went off, and I kissed her goodbye and then went outside so that I could go flying.
I knew that even though I'd been thinking about storms, there weren't going to be any today. The sky was clear, but more importantly, it felt like the sky was stable. Admittedly, just because it was where I was standing didn't mean that there wasn't a big storm coming, but I'd been here long enough to get a feel for the weather, and I was sure that there wouldn't be anything.
Dori wished me a good morning, and I told her that it was a CAVU morning, which is what the airplane pilots call it when they can see all the way to the horizon.
I was still kind of aimless while I flew. I didn't do any exercises; I just kind of wandered around the sky in my clear area until I decided it was time to go back to campus, and I waited in our room until it was my turn in the shower.
When I got breakfast, I took more than I wanted to eat on my plate by mistake, and I tried to give the extra away, but nobody wanted it, so I had to send it back into the kitchen. I hoped that whoever was taking the plates on the other end wanted my food because it would be a shame to waste it.
Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee said that on our last day together he was going to teach us about the Lyapunov Exponent. Before, we'd learned that the other ways had showed us how the points were distributed, but this was going to tell us how far it would diverge from its initial condition. And then he drew us a couple of lines and wrote out the equation for it.
What was really clever about it was that obviously two lines from the starting point couldn't diverge forever, so it took the average of a bunch of iterates, which meant that there was a lot of calculating involved and I liked that. I don't know why some of the other students grumbled when he started talking about repeatedly derivations. I guess they didn't like math as much, but I thought that each new equation he taught us was like a new toy to play with and see what it could do.
So even though I was sad when class was over, I knew so much more about math than I had before, and I bet there weren't a lot of other ponies who knew stuff like this. Probably not even very many unicorns (although Cayenne might).
I stayed until everyone else had left, and then I thanked him for his class and for teaching us so many things that I hadn't imagined ever before. And he told me that it had been a pleasure to teach me, and he hoped that I would find a use for nondynamical systems and fractals back in Equestria.
I was sure I would; some of the equations we'd learned might be useful for weather planning, especially if and when we had to start managing weather in a new district.
At lunch, everyone seemed just a bit out of it. I guess that my friends weren't any more prepared for the summer than I was. Only Joe acted normal (which for him is usually not paying too much attention to the rest of us). When Christine asked him why he was so chill, he said that he had two easy finals in classes he liked, and his third final was in Chemistry, and he'd figured out from what his class score was that he could not get his final grade up, and he would only fail the class if he got a two percent on the test, and there were fifty questions that were multiple choice.
He said that meant if he only got one question right, he'd pass the test, and since that was the case he was going to hedge his bets and choose 'b' every time. He hadn't decided yet if he should even open his test booklet, or just fill out the bubble-sheet and be done.
I told him that he should try to do better, and he agreed that he should, but then said that he didn't want to, which I thought was a really strange attitude.
On another hoof, there was more than one way to win Durak, so maybe his plan wasn't as dumb as it sounded to me. But even if it worked, what did he learn by it?
Professor Amy had us get back in our little groups, and she gave us more papers, which were based off the notes which we had taken in the last class. What I thought was really fun about it was that there was one page that we got and it looked like all the other ones, but it said 'Biased Result' in big red letters across it.
So we talked about that one first, and decided that we had managed to set up our observations in a way that we had gotten an unreliable result, but our method had shown us that it was unreliable.
That made us look over the rest of our work with a really sharp focus, because all of us were convinced that we had probably been in a fog on some other stuff, too, but how would we know what it was?
Everyone discussed that, and we decided that there were a couple of observations we'd made where there might have been bias, or where we hadn't thought them through enough, and that some of our conclusions might not be valid. So when we wrote up our final notes, we made sure to say what we weren't certain about, and then Rachel suggested that we ought to be sure to include how we'd seen what we'd seen, so that any future person who was reading our notes would understand why we thought what we did, in case we were wrong.
I didn't really think about that until after class, but when I was flying up the quad to my dorm room, I realized that before I'd come to Earth, I would have assumed that whatever conclusions I came to based upon what I saw with my own eyes were the right ones; now I found myself sometimes thinking that I needed to know more before I could decide one way or the other.
I took my Bible and sat in a tree to read it, but I didn't even make it through one chapter. I kept getting distracted and losing my place as I saw people walking across the quad and while I could have flown off to a quieter tree, it wouldn't have changed things much. I'd had my last class until the fall, and I'd turned in my essay at the very end of class. I had two final exams next week, and I thought that it wouldn't be a bad idea to go back through all my notes for math and make sure that I hadn't forgotten anything important, but that could wait until later. For now, I was a free mare.
So since I wasn’t going to get anything useful done, I went back to my dorm and then went to Ruth's room because her door was open, and she dressed me up in a shirt and lounging pants like she was wearing and then took a selfie with me and put it on her Facebook, and then we sat on her bed together and talked until it was dinnertime, and I took the clothes back off, which kind of disappointed her.
I asked if she was going to change (Peggy didn't like wearing her lounging clothes outside of the dorm), but she said that she was going to go to dinner in her lounging clothes because it was the last day of class.
The bad meals over the last few days had probably been so that they could save up enough bits for their big dinner: they had four special sections this time, one with American food, one with Chinese, one with Mexican, and one with Italian, and it was almost too much to choose from. So I wound up with a spring roll and fortune cookie, a little pasta with white sauce, and a taco, and if I'd thought I could eat more I would have taken a piece of pizza, too.
All of my tablemates had also mixed up their dinners, and so had everyone else I saw.
Christine said that they were doing this to make us not remember all the bad dinners we'd had, the ones with the beef patties floating in pools of oil, or the tater tots that were raw inside, and Sean said that was probably true, but he didn't care because right now he had the most American meal ever, which was a beef patty with cheese and bacon between two slices of pizza.
Christine said that she didn't know why she was dating him, and he said it was because she had bad taste in everything, which was why she liked Star Wars, and I thought she was going to punch him but she didn't.
Instead, she finished her food and got up and came back with a long loaf of bread and she said that George Lucas was her god, and when Sean looked over at her, she said that there can be only one and smashed him in the head with the bread. And when he started to object, she jabbed him with the broken loaf and said that she was settling the argument like a mature adult.
So he got up and came back with a chocolate cream pie, and he stood right across her at the table and held it up in his hand and said that there was only one proper way to end an argument over dinner, and she dropped her bread and pushed her chair back so fast I thought she was going to fall over, then he just set it in the center of the table and began lifting wedges out and putting them on our plates.
I only ate half of mine, 'cause I was full, and unlike my leftover breakfast when I offered it to Sean he ate it.
Everyone except Joe went to our room after dinner, and we played euchre and talked for a couple of hours, along with Ruth and Kat. Peggy made White Russians, and this time I was smart and only had two of them.
It was almost midnight by the time that Sean and Christine left. I had one more drink—only a small one—and then I flew off to Aric's house and got a little lost because I decided to fly by my apartment on the way and land on the balcony and look inside and then I thought I'd take a shortcut but flew in the wrong direction. Luckily I knew my way around the neighborhood pretty well and figured out that I'd gone the wrong way after only a block.
I didn't want to disturb anyone, so I fumbled with the key for a little bit before deciding that it would be easier to go through his window. It was half-open, and he had put a screen at the bottom to keep bugs out, but that was easy to push aside, and then I got the window a little bit further open but not quite enough and I got stuck on the sill and he had to rescue me. Which he had a hard time with, mostly because he kept laughing, and when he finally got a good grip on my pasterns, he said that maybe he ought to call the paramedics and have them meet me with a gurney.
I stuck my tongue out at him and once he'd helped me inside I said that if he'd left his window wider open that I could have flown right in and not had a problem.
He said that the screen wasn't bigger, so he couldn't unless he wanted moths and stuff to get it, and I said that I didn't mind moths. They were the butterflies of the night.
He wanted to finish up what he was doing on his computer, so I stretched out on the bed and had almost fallen asleep when he got in bed, even though it wasn't all that long. He kissed me and asked if I'd been drinking and I nodded. And he asked if I was really tired, and I said I wasn't that tired.