8 Mistakes Not To Make On New Year’s Eve

1. Don’t go to that party that you know your ex is going to be at. You’ll just want to kiss him/her when the clock strikes midnight and also what if he/she brought a date?! You won’t be able to deal! You’ll get plastered on cheap champagne and end up in the corner cuddling your own personal bottle of bubbly, weeping into its green glass mouth, the salt of your tears polluting that last fizz-less gulp. Speaking of which…

2. Don’t get too drunk! I know, I know… The whole point of New Year’s Eve is to get drunk. Another year with your too-low salary, tiny apartment, bad boyfriend, and daddy issues? That’s nothing to celebrate! New Year’s Eve is not so much a celebration of the new year as it is a reward for surviving the last 364 days. Congratulations! You made it! Shots all around! But seriously, don’t drink too much. The only thing worse than a champagne hangover is a champagne hangover with a full calendar of responsibilities and obligations staring you in the face. Also: If you drink too much, you’ll sleep too late and then all the good brunch places will be packed by the time you get yourself up, dressed, and out the door.

3. Don’t stay home alone, Xanax and a full Netflix queue your only New Year’s Eve companions. I know you may want to. I know you think it sounds much better than getting sloppy with a bunch of people you only barely tolerate. But just do something. Treat it like any other day: meet a similarly dispassionate friend for dinner, or see a movie in theatres, or go over to your girlfriend’s place and do something just the two of you. Trust me, it’s good for you. I don’t know why; it just is. It is good and healthy not to be a recluse on New Year’s Eve. If not directly, at least insofar as it proves to yourself that you can be a healthy reasonable human. And also, maybe, one day, when you’re finally out of this weird funk, you’ll be glad to look back and not see yourself as a complete bummer of a human being.

4. Don’t drink and drive. Seriously. Just don’t. Take cabs or stay at the same place all night or befriend a seriously sober person. Just don’t think you can drink and drive and have it turn it ok. It is absolutely not worth it.

5. Don’t try to have THE BEST NEW YEAR’S EVE EVER!!! because that is an impossible dream, sweet child. You will just be disappointed and unable to recognize the fun going on around you – fun you too could be having – for all the striving and stressing about tonight being good enough.

6. Don’t forget to bring: phone, keys, wallet. You’ll want to have enough cash to get home. You will very urgently need to call someone, perhaps for directions to a party, perhaps to let you in at the end of the night, perhaps to tell them that, yes, you do love them, you always have, and you’re sorry you waited so long to tell them so. You’re so, so sorry.

7. But don’t drunkenly confess to some love you do not truly feel, either. Don’t get drunkenly amorous. Don’t sext. Don’t sext, because: it won’t be answered, since we’re all out and busy with out own nights, and you’ll feel unnecessarily rejected. Because you should never drunkenly sext. Unless it’s to your boyfriend/girlfriend who’s used to it and finds it sweet/erotic. And also because a drunken NYE sext is just succchhhh a cliche.

8. In fact, avoid all other NYE cliches. NYE cliches are easy to recognize because they are mostly identical to prom night cliches. Don’t: become pregnant, impregnate, lose your virginity (though, somehow, taking someone else’s virginity seems perfectly reasonable and maybe even fun), cheat on your boyfriend/girlfriend, etc. NYE will forever be tainted by the memory of your icky actions. Even if the pregnancy is desired/a happy accident. Because the kid will grow up with the unsettling image of mommy and papa boning in the basement of some silly party.