op Five Worst New Year's Eves
5. Senior year of high school. Much-anticipated hotel party goes bust, leaving me with a drunk boyfriend and a bathtub full of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
4. How strange. I thought I had a lot of shitty New Year's Eves to share, but nothing else stands out. It's just that every year I feel like I have to actively fight my conventional expectations that New Year's is some explosive evening of romance and rock by, for example, staying home and folding laundry, which is what I'm going to do tonight. I always feel like New Year's Eve should be more significant than it is. I always feel like it would be nice to be in love. Of course, I have been in love on New Year's before. See #5.
3. Oh wait. There is this one weird thing I just remembered, which is the year that I tongue-kissed my best friend at midnight on a dare. Oh God, I'd forgotten about that. How upsetting. And then another year, she and I went to this expensive restaurant for dinner, and I got blotto, and started singing "Suck it up" to the tune of "Auld Lange Syne." I wonder why I did that. Those aren't terrible New Year's, though. I love my best friend dearly and New Year's Eve with her is always fun. Those are just New Year's Eve memories that make me cringe and things I probably shouldn't go blabbing about on, say, a personal Web site.
2. I feel like there's a lot of New Year's Eves when I've cried.
1. But maybe it's good to cry on New Year's. Maybe it's the best time to cry. Maybe instead of getting together to have a wonderful, fabulous, celebrity time, we should be getting together to cry. Really get it out of our system, go into the next year purged of all the disappointment or loss or humiliation we had to suffer the year before. Or okay, you don't have to cry, necessarily, but let's tell each other everything we always wanted to say. How about that? Let's have this truth-telling, soul-spilling party and just let the people who are important know how very hard, or how very much, or how very lonely, or how very truly. Oh I don't know. Maybe it's better if we just all get drunk. I, for one, will be doing my laundry.
Next year, we're gonna kick ass.