So it was Jan. 31, and you had a wicked night planned. You wore your best dress, had a magnum of champagne in hand and kept your eye on the clock with a hottie in sight. You told yourself that this year was going to be different — that New Year’s Eve was going to be everything you’d hoped.
Then you started to feel nervous. You speed-chugged the majority of the magnum, your crush started sloppily making out with what’s-his/her-name at 11:55 p.m. and your best friend vomited Cheezies soaked in cheap red wine as soon as the clock struck midnight. And there it was, 2013, arriving hand-in-hand with your old friend, regret.
I’m going to come straight out and say it. NYE sucks. Like every other holiday, New Year’s has been idealized beyond any reasonable imagining. It’s the night of magical new beginnings, when you’ll look your best and share a midnight kiss with your lover-to-be.
Or, if you’re a real person, generally mess everything up.
The main problem with New Year’s is that it contradicts the first rule of having a good night: never expect anything awesome to happen. Like any other situation that involves expectations, the less you have, the happier you’re going to be. But on NYE, people can’t help it. Everybody is conditioned to possess a small, twinkling hope that it will be the night that changes their life. That something so amazing is going to happen that the rest of next year can’t help but be better than the last. That somehow, kissing that attractive somebody you’ve been pining over will be the domino piece that propels your life straight into marrying a model and owning beach-front property.
I’m not above hoping that, somehow, this year will be better than the last. But as for the night of the 31st, let’s be honest with ourselves. It was just Christmas. You gained 15 pounds just by looking at the turkey, and you can’t even fit in your closet, never mind anything inside it. New Year’s is just a false hope that all that time you just spent with your family and all the future uncertainties they aroused in you will somehow be dashed by one special night.
It never works. I know for a fact that whatever I do on Dec. 31st, I’m still going to wake up the next morning exhausted, hungover and feeling equally as dismal about my future as I did the day before. I’m not trying to rain on your parade here, but the only way my year could improve with one night would be if that dream I had about Snoop Dogg (pre-Lion) actually came true.
Like every other New Year’s, Dec. 31, 2012, was just another day for which I failed to make plans well in advance, wore a dress only because all my jeans were too tight, lost steam by 11:30 p.m. and cried, at least once, in the bathroom of a bar I paid too much to get into.
And that, friends, is what I did New Year’s Eve.
If it were any other night, I probably would have just enjoyed the spectacle. But a lethal mixture of booze and hope brought me to an inevitable downfall (as it did many of you, I’m sure). So, happy New Year, and here’s hoping the other 364 days will make up for NYE.
