New Year’s Eve. Amateur night. A night that results in more insanity, arrests, and unintentional babies than probably any other night of the year. Every New Year’s Eve is pretty much the same. It’s cold, you’re drunk, and at midnight, you are desperately looking towards the closest member of the opposite sex to plant a hurried, uncomfortable, and toothy kiss on to ring in the next batch of calendar sales. Everyone thinks that their problems will magically get whisked away once January shows up, so the celebration of the end of anxiety is notoriously over the top. Every time. Of course, rational people know that their worries are simply buried under an avalanche of bean dip, carrot sticks, and alcohol. So we party the night away at house parties and dance clubs, finding some other similarly wasted person to belt out a boozy rendition of “Hollaback Girl” in the middle of the street. For one night, we forget our pain and suffering and get shitfaced amongst those who also want to get shitfaced. We take this opportunity to deal with the pricks that don’t go to our home bars but for once or twice a year and sneer at them with our townie friends. But it is all supposed to be fun. Everywhere is crowded and everywhere is a pain in the ass. We like it though, because there will be stories and pictures and people singing pop songs after drinking away the ability to properly use words.
What I am proposing is a way to make your New Year’s Eve and following hangover not suck. Certain precautions need to take place before going into the Eve, especially in regards to the following day’s likely mess of a life you are going to wake up to. Everyone has a different plan. Everyone has a different outcome. What follows is a simple guideline to ensure that your life isn’t completely fucked on New Year’s Day.
1) Designate a Driver: Don’t be a moron. If you need to drive somewhere and still get home that night, don’t drive yourself. You know how much you are going to drink (a shit load) so you know that you should employ someone to not drink and cart your slurring ass around all night. When I say employ, I mean you pay them for dealing with your drunken bullshit for several hours. New Year’s Eve holds always has the highest number of DUI’s of any night of the year. You don’t want to be one of the idiots that rings in the New Year in jail, do you? No. No you don’t. So instead of driving around and getting arrested and having your father bail your crying face out of jail, get someone to drive you around. Most people know a person that doesn’t drink for whatever reason, so they would probably be the way to go. Get a DD or get a DUI. Your choice.
2) Find a House Party: Can’t get one of your asswipe alcoholic friends to drive you around? Fine, there is an alternative. HOUSE PARTY! Like those incredible Kid N Play movies from the early 90’s, house parties are always fun. At someone else’s house, you can drink your face off, be an obnoxious dickhole for a few hours, and pass the fuck out on their bathroom floor. If the party is good enough, you can even break shit without repercussion. All you have to do is bring the booze you plan on drinking and maybe something for the host. House parties are the way to go, really. If you can weasel your way into one, you are set for the night. Extra bonus if the party is close enough to your house that you can stagger home when you are good and wasted. Better yet, go to one that is so far out of town that you have no choice but to stay there. Go to another state if you can, that way, you aren’t going anywhere. Of course, you might have to help clean up in the morning, but you got to take the good with the bad, I suppose.
3) Eat Something: You are going to be drunk. No doubt about that. So you might as well prepare for the worst. On the 30th and 31st, make sure you eat 3 square meals a day. By doing this you will have food in your stomach, thereby giving your body a chance to slow down the absorption of alcohol into your bloodstream. Of course, when you drink so much you vomit all of that food up, it won’t matter much, but you will be able to maintain for longer before getting too plastered for your own good. Food is your friend, but you have to be able to determine what foods you should be eating. I’m here to help. Stay away from fast food, as there is no nutritional content. You want to have something like pasta and dippy hors d'oeuvres.. Heavy starchy food will sit like a brick in your stomach, eliminating the desire to cover it with the flood of beer and whatever else the night brings with it, at least for a while. As your body digests the food, enough time will go by where you aren’t really going nuts yet. So when everyone else is staggering around, you are still standing, like a boss.
4) Stick to One Drink: This is essentially impossible, but worth a shot. If you are drinking beer, stick to beer. If you are drinking whiskey, stick to whiskey. Of course, this gets more and more challenging as the night goes along and you naturally want to change up to something else. Don’t, if you can help it. Now I know that you are going to be given a glass of the finest champagne for a midnight toast, thus the improbability of sticking to one drink for the night (unless you are Kanye West and can afford to drink the finest champagne for an entire night, and in that case, fuck you). Mixing different types of beverages will cause the body to react differently. Really, sticking to one will do nothing more than lessen the misery of the following day. For most people, switching to a different kind of booze halfway through the night is the kiss of death. For me, the choice is high quality beer. You can feel like a fancy pants person by consuming an elitist beverage (“craft brewed ale” does sound pretentious after all) and not getting stupid wasted too early in the evening. The finest champagne blows this up, but it doesn’t have to.
5) Water!: Every few drinks take a break with a glass of water. This will help with the hangover the next day. Seriously. Most of what a hangover consists of is dehydration. You see, alcohol saps your system of fluids (notice how you piss more when you drink? yeah, those are fluids, stupid) so the next day, after you have finished drinking, your body is parched. Drinking water now and then throughout the night will make it so you won’t be so dehydrated in the morning. Unlike sticking to a single drink, this one is easy. If your asshole friends give you shit for the water, call them the next day and scream into the phone about how much more brutal their hangover is than yours.
6) Don’t Be A Dick: This is pretty easy. New Year’s Eve is a time for celebration, so don’t be a dick about it. Hope springs eternal on this night, and your dickish attitude is doing nothing but bringing those around you down. I don’t give a shit if you are sober, or the DD or whatever, have a good time. If you are going to be that antisocial dipshit peasant that you usually are, then stay the fuck home. Nobody wants to deal with Debbie Downer while celebrating the New Year, so take your shitty face and leave the party. Obnoxious dicks are just as bad. Being too excited at midnight is equally as annoying as being the downer at midnight. I have fallen into that category a few times. Obnoxious dicks are more difficult to deal with because they, like the fruit fly, have very little concept of what is going on around them, so they bounce about their little world looking for something to land on. So keep calm and have fun, just don’t be a dick. Most of us are going to strutting our awesomeness around like a drunk peacock so don’t bring your dickishness around to ruin our good time.
7) Sleep: Congratulations, you made it home without making an embarrassing pit stop in jail. Now get some sleep. But before you do, take some aspirin. You are going to be hungover the next morning, so try to lessen the effects of this by taking a preemptive strike against your headache. Taking a few Aleve (or whatever, that’s what I use because that’s what I have) before going to bed will not only lessen the hangover, but it will get some water in your system and that will help (remember step 5?) The best thing you can do for yourself is having the ability to sleep it off. Of course, sometimes you have a shitty job that makes you come in at 9AM and you are still young where you don’t understand moderation. It’s New Year’s Eve, moderation isn’t in anyone’s game plan, so if you have a job where you have to be up in the morning, you are essentially fucked. This happened to me...twice...in a row. I was working a retail job, and luckily on New Year’s Day, most people are sitting around watching football on the couch and not buying stuff, so it wasn’t a trying day emotionally, but it certainly did suck physically. So to make sure this doesn’t happen to you, take New Year’s Day off, just in case your asshole manager schedules you for that day. And if you can’t get it off, you are pretty much fucked unless you stay home, which you won’t do because you like fun.
So there it is. Seven easy tips to make your holiday not suck. Really what it comes down to is you need to prepare for the worst and then try to not let it get that far. Everyone has fun on New Year’s Eve unless you are sick or an asshole (or both). So be safe out there, people. Have a good time. Sing, dance, drink, and be merry with the people that you want to be around the most. If you are in the position to choose what you want to do over the holiday, choose in a way that will limit the damage you can accrue. The goal is fun without getting arrested. And who knows, if you follow this list, you might get lucky, it is a night of craziness, after all.
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