Look, the little fiddly bits of the birds are hard

I am at my parents’ house over the holidays, where I always discover various regrets of the past, including the time I kept a diary in hieroglyphs.

When I was in the fifth grade, I got a journal for Christmas, The Unicorn Journal. It was really more of a picture book — it’s illustrated by Michael Hague. I was a little distrustful of it. How can you have a diary with no lock on it? But this journal was so prettily laid out that I couldn’t say no to it. I picked my favorite page and wrote in hieroglyphs, just to be sure:

IHAVCONCLUDIDTHATTHETUMBOFANKHESENPAATENCSISTSINAFOLSODITRMINDTHATIAMGOING

TUFINDITATSUMPOINTNRAITHRNFOTHR

When scraped clean, this says, “I have concluded that the tomb of Ankhesenpaaten exists in a false [?] room and that I am going to find it at some point or another.” This is not particularly considered likely, but it amuses me that people have still been trying to find Nefertiti in the exact same way.

The diary does not stop here, but it appears to largely dwell thereupon about how much I hate math and/or my teachers, and is less rewarding of careful decipherment.