Besting the Nosy Big Brother

No, not the government kind--that nag is out of the barn and grazing.

I'm talking about growing up with a brother several years older than a skinny, Care Child-looking girl who never had a moment's privacy from a spying snoop of a brother with a terroist personality.

Perhaps this is the unconscious basis of my detestation of Bush's NSA program which would still be unknown to us if that particular Big Brother had had his way. Why, this article is under their microscope as I type because it includes the words, BUSH, NSA, SPYING, and BIG BROTHER...and in CAPS, no less.

But one solution I could manage back in the 60s with a busy- body brother was to make up my own alphabet or code so that my diary would never again be under his scrutiny.

At least not successfully.

You can be sure that it drove him fairly nuts--the idea that he could no longer pry AND that he could never figure out my code.

It was a happy day for me when he finally gave up the game and admitted that he couldn't break the code and that my diary and anything else I committed to paper was beyond his grasping control, ha ha.

So I'm including a small example of said "code" for your consideration which was written earlier today just for you.

Obviously, I used it a lot back then because after all these years I still remember how to write it! And yes, I can read it, too (as in, "I can read reading but I can't read writing.")

The downside was that years later when I took Shorthand classes--remember Shorthand? I LOVED it--my code got mixed in sometimes...oops. I was probably the only person in the class with that little problem.

Plus, here's a question for you: did you ever practice writing backward and upside down simultaneously? Well, that's undoubtedly another helpful trick--and if I can ever figure out a use for it I'll be in on the ground floor!