Love Journal 2008

In high school, I had two cute friends who sparked a phenomenon amongst our circle of girl friends:

The Love Journal.

Our Love Journals not only chronicled every excruciating detail of our (mostly made-up) high school love angst, but they also contained quotes about love, pictures from romantic movies, notes from each other, lists of things like the number of "True Love Hugs" we received, and quotes from our daily lives that continue to make us laugh to this day-- since we all exchanged our journals to read and steal ideas for a more complete Love Journal of our own.

It was silly. There have been many times since 2003 when I have been so violently embarrassed about the ridiculous things recorded in my Love Journals (yes, there are multiple) that I've been tempted to burn them in a quiet, sentimental ceremony. Somehow, I think that burning ceremony might carry much of the same sentiment as the ceremony Kirsten, Heather and I conducted in the airplane bathroom when we flew to Disneyland for our choir tour...

Here is a little slice of what can be found in the Love Journals, because for all its humiliation, yes, I brought my Love Journal to college:

"To write a good Love Letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to tsay, and finish without knowing what you've written"
--Jean Jacques Rousseau

A Friend-- I think you're probably a good kisser.
Me-- What makes you say that?
A Friend-- Because of the way you hug.


Dear Valentine,
I love you. Whoever you are.
--Sally Brown

"Love makes me weak in the knees, light in the heart, and dizzy in the head-- it's kind of debialating."
--M. A. Ungerman

I wouldn't want to marry anybody who was wicked, but I think I'd like it if he could be wicked and wouldn't.
--Anne Shirley

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
--Matt Groening

Mr. Brower-- A wanton is someone who craves... bad stuff...
Gene-- Like french fries?

June 25, 2003
To every boy I've ever liked--
Yes, there have been a great many of you. I don't even remember most of you until I reread journals. Even then you are such shadows of my memory, it's hard to believe I could have been infatuated with you. Others of you I remember so well-- you're scratched into my memory for the rest of my life. But wahtever impact you did/did not or will/will not have on me is significant. The fact is each of you has helped mold my character and personality. You may not have ever liked me back or even knew who I was, but you and experiences I had with you have helped make me the person I am today. I hope your lives are wonderful. I hope you find someone deserving of you and live happily ever after. Thanks for everying,
Love,
Emily Llewellyn

"You know, Marissa's right. We write these Love Journals when none of us really know what love is. But that's okay, because the thing is--we're learning, one page at a time. And when our true loves do come along, we'll know the entire book--back to front."
--Heath the Feath

Reading through it makes me all kinds of nostalgic. There are many quotes I actually remember writing-- I remember where I was, who I was with, whose journal I was copying. It makes me smile.

For all their silliness, the Love Journals inspired a higher purpose. We all became obsessive journals, just generally speaking. The Love Journal phase petered out (I tried to continue it into my senior year, but it lost it's meaning, in part because my Love Journal girls had graduated and gone off to college without me), but the Journal itself pressed on. Soon our Love Journals and Dear Daughter Journals and Quote Journals and every other kind of journal idea that had been sparked-- soon all of our journals became one wonderful source of enlightenment, humor, sorrow, exploration.

They're how we caught up on each others' lives without having to repeat the same stories a dozen times. They were our alternative to passing notes. They became mini scrapbooks and memory books. I developed journaling habits in my junior and senior years of high school that have continued, though perhaps not in such detail, to this day. Maybe it's silly to admit, but thinking back on it literally fills me with an odd, but sweet, sense of emotion and longing. I miss those times. I miss those girls.

Fast forward to 2008. We've really begun our "growing up." We all went to college-- some of us have graduated, or are about to. Some of us have moved away. A handful of us have completed the Love story we dreamed of in high school and have gotten married. There are even Love Journal babies. We can never go back to high school when we sat in the front row of choir and blatantly read each others journals in front of our choir director, but it's okay because now we have:

The Blogspot.

Maybe it's less personal, and maybe we put less work into them as we did/do our hardcopy journals, but for all intents and purposes, our little blogs have taken the Love Journal tradition to the next level. Boil it all down, blogs serve a no different purpose than our Journals, except now our family and other friends read them too. We can still update, comment, and inspire each other. In some virtual, deep-down sort of way, we'll always have the Love Journals, and we'll always be those girls who write the Love Journals.

And for what it's worth, I still intend to write a young adult book series entitled The Love Journals.