Laura Jane Faulds

05.12.12

I never once in my entire life ever thought to imagine what my life would look like as I was 26 about to turn 27 if I wasn’t as famous as John Lennon. And now here I am, happier than I’ve ever been about anything for my life to be exactly as it is, to get to wake up every morning and see what’s beautiful about what’s boring rather than what’s awful about what’s interesting.  

One of my favorite things I’ve ever read about writing is by JD Salinger, how he felt so awful giving his characters such awful names, like Seymour, but he couldn’t help it- that was just what they were named. Sometimes I feel like the hugest jerk dooming my characters to live boring lives as intensely boring as mine is, but I can’t help it- those are just the lives they live. And I could never let them get beat down by it; I could never do that to them. And I don’t know how to write a sad ending; I just don’t. 

Today I was walking home from work trying to take a picture of my street so I could show the Internet how beautiful my street is, but every picture I took, it just looked like a street, and I wondered if maybe my street isn’t that beautiful at all, if maybe it’s just kind of beautiful, a beautiful that no one would ever notice if they weren’t trying to make it that. And I know a year ago that would have killed me, I would have wanted my street to be beautiful to everybody, I would have thought it so tragic to think that it wasn’t. 

I don’t care anymore. I don’t care what my street looks like to anyone else and I don’t care if anyone ever thinks my writing is as good as I do, ever. I  go to work all day and it’s alright and I hang out with my friends and it’s fun and I look at my street and I love it but when I’m writing, I guess, Ray Davies already put it better than I could, I feel like “there must be more to life than just to live it.” And I’m cool with being poor my whole life, but having that more of life- 

If you’re born boring, you have no choice but to be boring until you die and then you die. But if you’re not- you can choose to be boring at any second, you can do that, you can go get an MBA and date some dude who is a rock for you and stop writing or start writing for a newspaper, about the stocks or whatever- but if you’re boring, you can never, ever ever choose in your life to be interesting. It’s just not a choice that you’ll ever be able to make.