tomorrow i leave chico for good. my boyfriend and i are driving to san jose.

sunday night, he'll drive me to sacramento so i can fly to la and go to disneyland with my best friend for my 21st birthday.

wednesday morning, i fly to maryland, where i will meet all my belongings and my replacement cell phone. cuz some asshole stole mine at my fucking birthday party.

i am so done with chico. california...i love you. but i think we need some time apart. catch you later.

i had to write a blues song for my american music class and i'm really proud of it. i think it's hot. i'm gonna use it.

I will tell this to myself every day for the rest of my life. A realization hit me in the last 24 hours, and I am sick and tired of feeling like shit. This is my mantra. I hope to be back very soon.

I am an incredible person. People love to be around me because I am ebullient, witty, and intelligent. I radiate beauty and sincerity, and people admire that. There is no value in fearing the power of my personality. The effect I have on people is remarkably positive, and I will never be ashamed of that. The person I have always been is the person I will continue to be, regardless of my surroundings, my appearance, or the judgments of others. I deserve everything I receive, and am responsible for everything I release. I have fantastic aspirations for my future, and enormous enthusiasm for the lives of the people I will touch with those aspirations. I have tremendous faith in my continued success in life and an equal fervor for the betterment of myself as a human being. I believe in life and love and taking pleasure in the rapture of nature's inherent splendor.

                                                                ------- Rachel Lisa Howard

the only way to properly identify the mood i'm suspended in at the present time is intense. i got to thinking about my life up to this point. all the fantasies i've harbored over the years regarding several vignettes of what i'd hoped life would amount to for me at various times of my life. i started thinking of how much a dreamer i was as a young girl. i honestly believed life would be this magical fairy tale with love and romance and impossibly orgasmic happy endings to everything.

it got me to wondering if anything romantic ever happens anymore. the stories we all watch in movies like can't hardly wait and never been kissed and cry at how adorably affectionate the whole affair is...do they ever really happen? even on a slightly smaller scale? is there anyone that i graduated with that held a deep, secret love inside of them all four years, and to this day thinks about and misses and wants for this high school heartache he or she could never reveal? is there someone i graduated with that maybe sacrificed himself enormously, put his heart and soul on the line for someone else, and never mentioned it, out of care and respect for someone else? do these things ever really happen?

are these only fantasies? is a situation like this so crazy and elaborate that life never takes such a valiant path? i want to know if people, in actuality, ever experience this kind of romanticism, really, in real life. or if it's something songwriters and movie producers and authors all know and understand is the highest point of desire in the american or human mind. and they write to all of the world's greatest desire to be loved and be bewildered by it. please tell me that great love still exists.