secret code

Usually my dreams are mildy strange and not particularly noteworthy. Last night was one of those nights. I dreamed that I was going on a long road trip but I didn't have any plan on where to go, so I was looking at a US map to find the cities with the weirdest names and then I would plan a route through those cities... while doing this I found Banana, North Dakota and Zoooooo, Michigan (both not real, I would hope) and then I got to Illinois. On my dream map, Illinois was now suddenly shaped like Tennessee and they'd changed all the names of the cities to a number and a letter. For example, the capital was 1A and the surrounding cities were something like 8b, 7s and 4r. Except for Manhattan, oddly, the city in which Alan lives.


Today in my Theory class we were talking about Structuralism, and I was kind of nodding off a little bit, but then sometime near the end of class we started talking about words and meanings and how a word may have a few different meanings but our understanding of which meaning is being used is a social and contextual knowledge... then someone brought up the book "Frindle" about the kid who renamed the pen to be a frindle, and how easily it was able to catch on, and then someone else brought up an assignment she'd had as a senior in highschool where her pyschology class had to invent a word and start using it in the hallways/cafeteria and whatnot to see if they could make it a new slang term within their school...

...and then THAT reminded me of when I was in middle school, a handful of friends and I had this code we used to pass notes. We basically came up with new symbols for all 26 letters of the alphabet and used them in notes we'd pass to each other so that if our notes were intercepted by anyone else they wouldn't be able to read it and our secrets would be safe. We used it so often that we became really fluent in our little secret written language and even though it only existed on paper, it was still an entirely new language that we invented for ourselves.

I'm not sure how ANY of this relates to structuralism, but the point is I'd forgotten how innovative I was as a child. It's a shame I was such a terrible pre-pubescent girl back then, using my powers for evil. You are all very lucky to know now!Kristina and not then!Kristina. I'm much nicer. ^_^