I was informed yesterday that what you do on midnight on December 31, and for the rest of January 1, determines what your 2005 will be like. Given the day I have had, I don’t really know what to make of that. At midnight, I was having a nice quiet evening with Len in our house surrounded by cats. That part was pretty good. But we were also two bottles of wine for the worse, singing along loudly with the yodelling goat song from The Sound of Music , and I was expounding upon my new theory that Christopher Plummer’s hotness and discipline issues in that movie were responsible for raising a generation of masochistic girls. (Because seriously, young Christopher Plummer, with the little whipping cane, going on about how discipline is the first rule of the house? Damn. I’m not even that kind of girl, really — I don’t have the energy for outfits — but that’s kind of hot. In a disturbing way because I don’t really want to picture Julie Andrews in latex. And now I’m sad that I didn’t do Holidailies this year because this parenthetical aside would have made a great pull quote.)

So really, that was a lot of fun, and I’m glad we did that instead of a New Year’s Eve party, but I have no idea what that says about the year to come. Then today, the following things have happened:

1) In an attempt to do laundry like a responsible adult, I threw myself down half a flight of stairs, with a great racket of screeching and thumping, and managed to scrape or bruise a large percentage of my surface area in the process.

2) I left my laptop on the floor next to my side of the bed, where no one ever stands but me so I was not terribly concerned, and then Len picked today to hang out on my side of the bed and stepped hard on my laptop case. My laptop, which weighs a thousand pounds and is seemingly indestructible, has turned out not to be so. It now has lovely spiderweb-cracks all over the display, and the woman on the tech support line says it’s not covered by my service contract and will cost an arm and a leg to have replaced. Also she cannot tell me whether I must mail it in or whether a technician can come to my house, so I have to call back on Monday to sort that out. So apparently I can look forward to a year of drunkenness, broken electronics and unhelpful customer service, klutzy staircase mishaps, and speculation on whether Fraulein Maria was a bottom or a top.

This will either be the best year or the worst year ever, and I really have no idea which. (Also: I am not quite clear on whether my new notify list is working as it should despite all my testing it last week, so I don’t know if anyone got notification of my tipsy New Year’s ramblings last night. But there are some. Though if you’re on the notify list and it’s not working, you’re probably not reading this unless you’re subscribed to the RSS feed, so why I’m bothering with this statement I do not know.)

I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon…I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales…I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts. ~ G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy”

It’s funny that I stumbled across this Chesterton essay (series of essays?) today, as I’ve had fairy tales much on the mind the last few days. I took a little whirlwind trip to New Jersey this weekend to catch up on some theater. I’m afraid that ever since Melissa introduced me to Mary Zimmerman by urging me to go see her play Metamorphoses, I’ve become a crazed Zimmerman convert and would go to the ends of the earth to see her plays. So it was convenient for me that there was a staging of The Secret in the Wings going on just an hour’s drive from my parents’ house, saving me the trip to the ends of the earth.

This particular play is based on a series of several fairy tales that keep being referred to as “little-known” or “unfamiliar” or “obscure” in reviews I’ve looked at. I’m finding that classification quite amusing, because I know every single one of those fairy tales deep in my bones. I don’t just know them the way you know old commercial jingles or half-remember a favorite childhood bed-time story — I know these stories the way I know my name or my most secret and beautiful childhood dreams. They’re in my blood.

I was a voracious reader from the moment I could first read when I was three, and I always read everything I could get my hands on. Any genre, any reading level, I just wanted to mainline words any way I could get them. But it was fairy tales that I really loved. Fairy tales from every culture I could find, as many variants of the older tales as I could find, modernizations, movie adaptations, anything and everything. Which is probably why I loved that play, and why I was thrilled to have stumbled across that particular section of the Chesterton essay this evening. (The rest of it, I could take or leave, I must admit. I mostly skimmed. I told you fairy tales are what draw me.) It’s just so perfect. And makes me want to go see the play again, which is clearly logistically impossible, or at the very least to settle in with my favorite giant Brothers Grimm collection. Which, alas, I cannot find! I have never properly organized my books since we moved into this house, and I can never find what I’m looking for anymore, but this particular case is clearly not to be tolerated. I plan to spend a good chunk of the weekend reorganizing my bookshelves, because a life without fairy tales right at my fingertips is not a life to be tolerated.