Guide to New Year's Eve

Probably the most arbitrary and overrated holiday ever.

Let’s take a day of the year and decide that it’s the day where we say it’s next year, then let’s celebrate our ability to divide time up into units, and let’s all get drunk and kiss each other, and let’s agree that it’s pathetic to spend the night at home watching Dick Clark with your dog and actively fighting off the urge to masturbate so that you orgasm exactly when the countdown is over (because you’re so bored, not because you’re turned on by your dog or Dick Clark).

But getting drunk and kissing people is fun, so if you have the means to do that instead of yanking it while Dick Clark counts backwards from ten, you should. You will find the experience to be overrated and arbitrary, though. Really, the best thing to do on New Year’s Eve is work. Preferably in some sort of service job where drunk people who never usually go out are tipping you to do something they could easily do themselves. I once made like 300 bucks working coat check at some swanky party. All I had to do was sit there drinking free champagne and get people their coats for like 4 hours. It was the best New Year’s Eve ever.

Well, I guess there was also that other one where it was a huge party in a loft somewhere and a couple of great bands played and somebody I don’t even know gave me a whole unopened bottle of bubbly, and I was drinking straight out of it and dancing to some great old soul 45s that the DJ was playing and I was kissing a bunch of good-looking people and all of my friends were there. But failing that, you could do a lot worse than 300 bucks for huddling yourself against a space heater for 4 hours. Sometimes you’ve got to do a different kind of aiming high.

You know what kills a party? Expectations. Expectations kill a party dead. You know when you hear about a party, and you're out with some buddies and you’re like “I heard about a party” and they’re bored so they’re like “let’s go” and it’s like you’re re-auditioning for their friendship by hopefully knowing about a super fun party? And then you get there and it’s like five dudes milling around and two drunk girls are loudly cackling about how dirty the host’s bathroom towel is, like “Pete! Pete! Is this you towel? [Cackle cackle!] Pete! Look how dirty your towel is! [Paroxysms of derisive laughter.]” And then you check the living room and there’s some stoned guy with a beard petting a cat. Well, of course you’re going to have one of those “oh no” moments where you’re worried about the rest of your night and whether or not your friends will ever like you again. But you don’t have any other plans and you brought a twelve pack of High Life and you might as well make the most of it. If you get into the right zone, those girls actually are hilarious, and that cat guy has some really awesome theories about Jesus. Once you let go of your expectations, there’s no reason why that can’t be a great party.

New Year’s Eve is laden with expectations. If you went to a New Year’s Eve party and it was those towel cacklers and the cat dude, you would be pissed. You’d even tell yourself that you have every right to be pissed, because New Year’s Eve is supposed to be about evening gowns and champagne and kissing people and ballroom dancing and just generally going wild with a bunch of friends that you’re happy to be around. Well. No it’s not. It’s not supposed to be anything. That kind of thinking is what makes people decide that maybe it’d be best to just stay at home with their farting dog and eat a whole bag of Ore Ida fries while noncommittally diddling their balls. Pretty much everything is better than that. More importantly, if you’ve got the right mindset about things, nothing is better than that.

Have you noticed how if a New Year’s Eve party is only medium fun, there’s this frantic desperation about making it more fun? You can smell it. It’s kind of like the difference between that regular high octave noise and the crazy “I’m blowing too hard” noise coming out of a noisemaker. If you’re blowing that thing that hard, it’s like you’re announcing, “I don’t want to be here, but I want to want to be here! Happy New Year! I’m going to keep drinking until I like this!” Sure, you could follow that desperation down whatever road it takes you, and tomorrow you’ll end up with one of those “am I pukey because my head hurts, or does my head hurt because I’m so pukey?” hangovers, and you’ll be in somebody else’s bed and you’ll have to take the train home with your suit still on, and it’s bad but not the worst because at least you don’t have to work, and there’s a quiet air of victory about it because at least you really did something one hundred percent all the way and who cares if it was stupid. Of course you could just go home. It’s not always fun to party with a bunch of frantic desperados, and it’s only midnight. You’ve still got plenty of time for that whole bag of Ore Ida.