April 12
Since I didn't have my flight clothes, after sex and snuggles I had to trot for my morning exercise. That was okay; it's good to exercise everything. But I've decided I don't like the sidewalks so much; it feels like my hooves are wearing down too much. The cement that makes up the sidewalks is very rough which is probably good for human traction but not as good for hooves.
I waved to a blue-haired woman who was getting her newspaper, and she waved back at me. I hadn't seen her ever before, but she obviously had lived there for a while. As I continued past, I thought about how strange it is when you really think about meeting people or ponies in passing. Like my classmates, they had lives of their own before they’d met me, but now I was a part of their lives and they were a part of mine.
The blue-haired woman has probably heard me clopping by her house before, and maybe even seen me out her windows, and until just today I had no idea that she even existed. And there could be some day in the future when I'm back in Equestria that she misses the sound of my hooves trotting by her house.
That was kind of a strange thought to have in the morning, but sometimes when I was out trotting my mind went off odd places.
After my shower and breakfast, I sat down at my desk and stared at my paper again. There was a poem that wanted to be let out, but it was stuck in my head. There were a whole bunch of ideas that had half-occurred to me while I was trotting down Academy Street or rinsing the soap out of my wings, but they'd all gone and hid.
Clicking on my pen with my tongue didn't make them come back, and neither did going from the desk to the bed, so after too long spent in frustration, I finally gave up. The words would come when they wanted to, but I couldn't force them.
I set my paper back down and looked out the window for a little while. There were skeleton-trees outside, and when they decided that it was spring they'd get leafy, but they were waiting for the right time, and maybe I was, too. Maybe this was my mind's way of telling me I wasn't ready yet.
Once when I was a filly I was looking over the edge of a cloud (I wasn't ready to fly yet) and down below I saw a ship that was making circles outside the harbor, and I didn't know why they wouldn't just go in. Only later did my Mom tell me that they had to wait for the tide to be right because otherwise they'd scrape open the bottom of their ship and it would sink. How must those sailors have felt to be so close to their port and yet they couldn't go there?
I looked out at the tree again. It was waiting. The ship had been waiting. I was waiting.
Sometimes that was all you could do.
I ate lunch with Cedric and Leon and Trevor. I was a bit hesitant 'cause of how the last time had gone, and I might not have if Leon hadn't come up next to me in the line and asked if he could carry my tray.
I couldn't say no, so I let him and then followed him over to his table. He set it down and made a big show of making sure that it would stay on the table and my ears drooped and I said that I was really sorry for overreacting. He said that we were cool, but when I went around to nuzzle him he held his hand out and pushed me back a little and said that we weren't that cool. Then he saw the look on my face and kind of glanced around the room to make sure nobody was looking and ran his hand through my mane and told me that by the end of the semester he'd be the laughingstock of the football team.
Just then Cedric set down his tray and told him that he was already the laughingstock of the football team. He said that the only reason anybody watched the games at all was to see his sack.
I said that I'd like to see it, too, and both of them looked at each other and just started laughing. I knew that I'd missed something, but that happened a lot when the two of them were together. They both had a strange sort of relationship, and I couldn't quite figure it out, no matter how hard I tried.
When Trevor sat down, they calmed down a little bit, but both of them were still snickering a little.
Conrad surprised us by not being in class when we started. There was an empty glass vase on his desk, and a small folded card leaned up against it that just said 'in memory.'
We kind of looked around at each other trying to figure out what the reason was, and finally five minutes after class had started a girl named Erica went up to the desk and opened the card and started to read.
It was a poem inside, about how the flowers the poet had described a hundred years ago were dead and gone but there were new flowers now. After she read the poem she untied the card from the vase and passed it around and pretty soon we were talking about the poem and what it meant.
We almost didn't notice when he came into class, because everyone was focused on the poem. But he spoke, reciting another poem:
I asked of Destiny, “Tell me who with relentless hand pushes me on?”
Destiny told me to look behind.
I turned and saw my own self behind pushing forward the self in front.
He told us that the man who had written those poems was called Rabindranath Tagore and he had been a poet from India. He told us about his travels and how he also had been awarded a Nobel Prize.
He said that we could have a whole class on just Rabindranath Tagore and that we could have a whole second class comparing Tagore to Kipling, but that life was too short and then he read us another poem from The Gardener, which was the 38th.
Then class was over, and I went right to the library before anybody else thought of it and asked one of the librarians to help me find that book. I was sure that they would have it; the library has three floors which must mean that they have a copy of nearly every book that there is.
He showed me how to use the computer that knew where the books were, and then gave me directions to find it.
It was on a top shelf, so I had to fly up to get it. The library had little stepstools on wheels, but it wasn't tall enough for me to reach the book. I felt a little bit guilty when I got it because a lot of places it isn't polite to fly inside without having permission first, but nobody yelled at me.
The same card that lets me into the dining hall and the dorms lets me borrow library books, but instead of swiping it through a reader, there is a wand that reads the stripes on the book and the stripes on my card, and then the computer that knows where all the books are knows that Silver Glow has The Gardener.
Before dinner, I got done with my homework for tomorrow’s classes even though I wanted to read the poetry book right away, and then it was time for dinner.
When I got back to my dorm room, I sat right down on my bed and read through the whole thing. The book was very interesting; it had English on one side and on the other it had the original language which looked very beautiful, even though I couldn't read it at all.
And I really liked the poems, too. I hoped that I hadn't spoiled class for myself on Thursday by reading these. It felt a little bit like I was cheating by reading ahead, which was funny because I didn't feel that way in any of my other classes. But then I just pictured myself confessing and Conrad would just smile and ask me which was my favorite poem and why.
Tagore and Einstein
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Rabindranath_with_Einstein.jpg
From wikipedia
For some reason, when I saw this had updated on my faves list today, an amusing thought popped into my head: if an average Ponyvillian participated in this program, they might've suffered a running joke because one of the first things they asked the locals was where the nearest in-case-of-monster shelter was and then had to convince everyone they were serious
Also: feels for Silver. My teachers were never so understanding about reading ahead
I gotta re-read the chapter with the apparent fight in the cafeteria. I must've missed something because I didn't realize that there was trouble in paradise when I read it the first time.
7291968 I think the teeth freaked him out, especially combined with her whole threatened/aggressive pose.
7291968
April 7; it was more of a misunderstanding than a fight.
...every writer knows this pain.
7291989 Sure, but I didn't realize that there was any emotional bruising.
Once again she leaves me wondering. Does she think he's talking about a bag of some sort or does she actually want to see his balls?
Oh Silver, you'd be so much fun to have as a friend.
7292064 Silver felt very scared and then very silly for being scared in precense of friend and even more silly for causing a scene. While I wouldn't use scarring, I get why she is still a bit sensitive about it.
I don't think Silver quite understands just how prolific human authors have been.
Really good.
7292205 'Bruising'.
I guess I need to re-read a lot more for this to make sense to me, Cedric, Leon, and Trevor have sort of blended together into one unit, and if there were any sports-references with the small debacle, I wouldn't get it.
7291984
Yeah, if I read it right, she thought she harmlessly corrected someone regarding her boyfriend's physical attributes, but they tensed because they thought she was pissed and then she felt the tension and her fight/flight instincts kicked in and then they got scared because it looked like she was attacking.
7292282
Or maybe just how prolific humans are, does she realise there are almost seven and a half billion of us? And what that actually means?
At the point we have roughly Equestrian technology the earths population was only about 1 billion and ponies don't seem to cover the whole of their world, so what's there population? About 0.3 billion like Europe had, 0.03 like America, or 0.7 like Asia? Maybe Earth pony and Pegasus magic together means they can support a much higher population than their land holdings would suggest.
Maybe she should consider horseshoes. Though they should probably be clipped on because that's an annoying weight to be flying around with.
*snrk*
That look that you can only see on the face of a pony that you have just refused to let nuzzle you.
This kills the human.
Silver you are insatiable.
https://iversity.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Rabindranath-Tagore.jpg
I didn't realize Albus Dumbledore was real.
wow poor Silver, maybe she catches the hints along the way, that everything that can be related to sex, will be. no matter the original context.
This is pretty much pure, solid irony. I love it. A shame Silver hasn't learned the fine art of writing about not knowing what to write about.
Heh. I always get a kick out of Silver vastly underestimating something. I'd love to see her reaction to the Library of Congress.
A greatly enjoyable chapter. Silver really does have the soul of a poet, even if she doesn't fully realize it.
vase
I've never actually checked out a book (or even read a book) from the school library. Out of all the academic resources available to me, I've used the library the least.
Whew, you had me worried there for a bit, but then it turned out to be one of Conrad's unique lesson "plans".
7291919
Huhh... Tagore looks a little bit like one of the guys I've worked with while doing volunteer IT work at a local mission.
Hey, the homeless sometimes need to use computers too, y'know. And Mike's a great guy. He's a truck driver now.
Tagore and Kipling were born in the same year and died within five years of each other. It would be fascinating to read each of their reactions to the events of their lifetime.
7292654
She knows the world population (I think it was mentioned at some point) but probably hasn't grasped all the implications of that. "7.5 billion" is not a number you can really wrap your head around.
She also doesn't know the literacy rate (note that Equestria seems to have significant illiteracy for such a highly developed nation), and she may not have realized how much easier it is to write and publish books with digital technology.
7291939
Hoben Hall has a fallout shelter in the basement. At least it did when I went to K.
Mine had mixed feelings.
7291984
Yeah; she surprised him more than anything. Wide wings and hooves up on the table, ears pinned and baring her teeth . . . that'd get me to back off real quick, too.
7291998
Yes indeed.
7292064
More of embarrassment at her foolishness. What's one level less than emotional bruising? Emotional Indian Burn?
7292144
She's watched the Superbowl, so she knows what a sack is in football and doesn't get that there's a second meaning to it.
7292282
No, she still has trouble with the scale of humanity. Really, everything about us.
7292325
7292654
She has no idea. I even have trouble wrapping my head around it when I really try and think about it.
7292656
She could get another set of hoof-boots, too. Like the ones that got modified for her snowboard.
It's banned by the Geneva convention.
Only a little bit.
He just looks like the kind of guy where you'd want to listen to anything he says. And according to his bio on Wikipedia, he was a pretty cool dude.
7292711
Sooner or later she'll figure it out. Maybe next time they have fortune cookies she'll have an epiphany.
7292755
Good thing I have
It would overwhelm her completely. Heck, she could take a trip to Ann Arbor; U of M has 13.8 million books in their library. That's no Library of Congress, but it's still a lot.
Which, based on some simple math, tells me that U of M could give away one book to every resident in the state of Michigan, and still have enough left over to be on the top 100 list in the US.
She does. Conrad's trying to get her to recognize that.
7293058
Huh. That seems really odd to me. I had all the parts of the Dewey Decimal system that interested me memorized.
7293525
7292935
Correction made; thank you!
7294088
He looks either really wise or really crazy, and sometimes there isn't a lot of difference.
7294452
And the two of them both had opinions on India . . . yeah, I'd really like to read more about both of them. I honestly didn't know about Tagore until about a week ago.
7305200
Emotional wedgie.
Wow, Silver's getting quite blatant at that. Then again, we probably have gotten used to it at this point.
Well, at least no one else pitched in to see it.
But alas, back to the usual routine for Silver.
Because its relevant to the chapter. Anyone else wish they could see Twilights reaction to walking into the Library of Congress?
7318449
I can accept this.
7375456
Leon's already seen Cedric's sack a bunch of times
Her usual routine is a happy routine.
7743482
Because its relevant to the chapter. Anyone else wish they could see Twilights reaction to walking into the Library of Congress?
pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw2597-tumblr_ltdjzpe1sC1qjr6eb.gif
It's funny how many of the commenters on this chapter are under the delusion that they comprehend the sheer scale of modern humanity. I don't know Jimmy, Sally or Susie from Canada; we have triple the population of NYC spread across more land than the entire US.
10980503
I can’t begin to comprehend it. I’m more well-traveled than the average American, and yet there are limitless places on Earth I’ve never been, many of them gigantic cities well beyond my comprehension. I’ve been stumped by how a foreign toilet is meant to be used.
Sometimes I get reminded of that when some of my international audience asks questions about what’s a very American thing that I have wrongly assumed is common knowledge (like Home Depot stores).
10983308
One of the "joys" of foreign travel is discovering the Horror From Hell that foreigners use for a toidy & the worse Horror that they use for wipes.
11042834
I’ve never visited anyplace really far out (from an American experience) in that regard, but have heard stories. I have used a squat toilet before, and had to ask how it worked And also gotten the explanation of how a toilet on a small boat worked, because that’s not intuitive, either.
While it doesn’t really come up in this story, I have since learned that IRL equines have self-cleaning butts, so much to the horror of visiting humans, maybe they never bothered to invent any kind of wipes at all.
“Where’s the TP?”
“The what now?”
11043795
Actually, we do know that Equestrians have TP because we see that somepony has TP'd the tree outside Rarity's boutique in one of the Nightmare Night episodes.
This one hurts me, personally. O writer's block, thoust of mediocrity's breast; how ignoble thy victory. Or something.
11213446
I get it every now and then. Usually I’ve got so many projects I’m working on, though, it’s not a want of ideas that’s stopping me, just a complete and utter lack of motivation.
11204585
How do we know they weren’t using rolls of adding machine tape?
Kipling lived in another time. It was considered socially acceptable to refer to all non Europeans as "niggers". He didn't use it in his poetry but his other stuff..... He was also pro Colonialism & pro military. Look at "The White Man's Burden" (His advice to the USA after the Spanish American War.) Other than The Jungle Book a LOT of his stuff is out of print.
Still, during his life he was considered the greatest living English writer & some of his stuff is still good.
Life's Ironies
One of the most pro military poets was never in the military. (Bad eyes = 4F + too old for WW1)
11243853
I think that’s the case for many historical figures. Heck, many of our own ancestors. And I suppose in the future, some of our descendants will look back at us and wonder why we were so backwards.
I feel like you can support something without being a part of it for whatever reason.