I hate New Years. It’s not anybody’s fault, but I hate being pressured to have fun, and New Year’s is the pinnacle of “ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?”
And sometimes we are! Sometimes it is fun to hang out with your two best friends and eat snacks and watch the Naked and Afraid marathon until you’re tired and you go home. (See: my last three New Year’s.) Sometimes it’s fun to go to Red Lobster and to the movies (my three New Year’s before those). But most of the time those things aren’t what happens, and you’re stuck at a party waiting for Ryan Seacrest to talk and Jenny McCarthy and Wahlberg to make out and you have nothing but time to ask yourself where it all went wrong.
That’s why I’m here to tell you that if you want to forfeit New Year’s, I’m here for that. This year, I am going to eat chips in my bed while watching BBC series reruns and I may even go to bed before midnight because 2016 deserves to be forgotten and I personally want it to feel unimportant. So if you’re looking for options that will rescue you from the clutches of a New Year’s Eve party, I have them for you. And if you tell your friends you are doing the following instead of hanging out with them, I guarantee you will never be invited to another New Years party again.
So! Instead of going to a party, you are:
- Watching TV
- Watching a movie
- Reading a book
- Reading a magazine
- Reading the shampoo bottles in your bathroom
- Cleaning your bathroom
- Sitting in your bathtub, pretending it’s a sleigh
- Naming your sleigh
- Wondering why Citizen Kane named his sleigh
- Typing “Rosebud” into your online banking profile in hopes that it will give you money like it did in The Sims
- Wondering whatever happened to your Sims family
- Playing The Sims
- Ordering $60 worth of Pizza Hut and basking in the knowledge that tomorrow you have lunch and dinner sorted (or: the Anne T. Donahue Special)
- Going to the drug store to buy ginger Gravol because you weren’t supposed to eat that much Pizza Hut in one sitting, that Pizza Hut was meant to last you days
- Roaming the aisles of Shoppers Drug Mart, pillaging for discounted Christmas chocolate
- Sitting in your car, wondering how you just spent $90 on discounted chocolate
- Eating one chocolate for every bad thing that happened in 2016
- Eating one chocolate for every good thing that happened in 2016
- Realizing you should’ve waited to eat the chocolate until you got home
- Realizing you forgot to buy the ginger Gravol
- Saying, “Fuck it” and driving home
- Getting into your PJs and watching repeats of Great British Bake Off until you don’t feel sick
- Deciding to bake one of the dishes yourself
- Falling asleep while deciding what to bake
- Waking up at 8 a.m. totally rested and maybe a little bloated but very ready for the year of our lord 2017
- Finishing the chocolate you didn’t get around to eating the night before
Happy New Year’s, one and all!
