Nina and I tried to celebrate New Year’s Eve. We really didn’t love the holiday, but we made an effort. There was the year we made a reservation with friends at a fancy new place downtown with a big group of friends and at least three of us went home before the end of dinner with gastrointestinal distress, including both Nina and me. Or 1999, when we drove to my parents house in Pittsburgh from Ithaca NY through a massive snowstorm, and I got the flu, so we watched the ball drop around the globe on the new Millennium while I heaved and sweated off about twenty pounds. Eventually we stopped fighting the obvious forces telling us not to go out on NYE. But even then, there was the year that a car carrying two VERY drunken souls collided with and knocked over the telephone pole in our front yard at 2:30 am, and we awoke to find the police interviewing a very impressively dressed transgendered prostitute and her client on our front walk amidst the wreckage of their car and our hedges.

Here are my hard won tips for avoiding NYE debacles like these. Enjoy at your own risk.

1. Stay in.

2. Do not, under any circumstances, go out. See step one.

3. If invited to a party or other gathering, politely decline.

4. Make plans. To stay home.

5. Update your queue on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon.

6. Make sure your supply of brown liquor, dispensary-purchase legal marijuana, or other mild stimulant is freshly stocked.

7. Cheese straws.

8. If you have to socialize, invite only a small number of trusted friends before whom you have previously vomited, been intoxicated, and/or gone through labor & delivery.

9. Lower your blinds. And your expectations.

10. Get out of town. We came to the left coast to hang out with trusted souls before whom we have probably done many embarrassing things. Seems to be working so far, though NYE itself is the true test. New year, new headspace, new scenery.

Happy end of 2018 to everyone. I hope I get the chance to not only see you in 2019, but be nicer and better to you than I was last year, even if I was nice to you before (this is the only New Year’s resolution the boys and I are making).

XOJD