It’s time for the holidays. The special time of year where we sit down to celebrate gluttony, family dysfunction, consumerism AND the very best time to pry secrets out of your drunk family!
For instance three holidays seasons ago, I asked my mother, who I remember distinctly was holding a mug of Chardonnay with an ice cube in it, why she had decided to have another child after having two basically sufficient ones 15 years before…she laughed, telling me something along the lines of, “Oh honey, you weren’t expected! I was 40 with one ovary! But the good news is that we kept you, and you ended up being the best mistake I ever made.” This, as you can imagine, left me feeling extra medium.
This is also the time when most of us return home, back to the scene of our early sexual crimes, strolling through the bone-ridden graveyard of our first romantic loves. Due to my recent rewatching of Bridget Jones’ Diary, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is about returning home for the holidays that makes most of us crawl back inside the primordial, amniotic sack of insecurity, self-doubt, and angst that plagued us throughout our teenage years. I’m positive that it’s these regurgitated feelings that cause us to seek out sexual validation with peoples whose private parts you normally wouldn’t touch now, even if they were covered in money.
The catalyst to all these holiday hijinks usually begins with Dionysus levels of wine. Alcohol is usually the cause and solution to all of our problems and has this uncanny ability to contort reality and fill your usually rational brain with idealized memories of when you were younger, smarter, thinner and perkier. It helps you romanticize your past, fondly painting a portrait of a time where your future was limitless. A time that seemed to have unlimited doors open, mostly to the back seat of whatever hot-guy car was in fashion at the time (Wrangler, Saab convertible, Bronco 2, perhaps a vintage LandRover), where a boy that looked hopefully looked like Jared Leto would be waiting to give you a gynecological exam with about as much skill as a Cro Magnon Man trying to use an iPhone X.
Ultimately, we all know the point of seeing people from your past is to have a Romy and Michelle moment where you strut in, in a lame dress made out material that could have been used on the Hubble telescope and blow everyone away with your next level success.
But the moment you open Pandora’s Box of your hook-up past, you lose all the street cred you’ve been building with your perfect, Brita’d, social media life. Isn’t the whole point of crafting such an elegant version of yourself online that all your exes can see how far above them you are now? Well, that won’t work if you’re acting like a world hot dog eating champion at the penis buffet of your past.
Remember kids, Dr. Nightingale’s golden rule, always FUCK UP. If you’re going to share your sacred Yoni with another human, fuck right on up. Jefferson that shit, finally get your piece of the pie. Looking back usually does nothing more than leave you a pillar of salt and is the ultimate expression of basicness. Everyone knows only basic bitches need to recycle semen.
Here are my proven, kid tested, mother approved methods of avoiding hooking up with an ex over the Holidays:
- Let the hair on your legs grow out so far you look like an extra from planet of the apes
- If you’re a cheap degenerate gambler like me, no better way to avoid hooking up with a Monet-like ex than betting someone 50 bucks that you won’t. Put yo money where your mouth should not be.
- Wear your most superfund worthy underpants. Underpants that could have been used as an example of the cleaning power of dawn dish soap commercials after the Exxon Valdez spilled.
- Gain so much weight the whole year before Thanksgiving that people confuse you with an emotional support pig. (Lipstick won’t help you)
- Roofie yourself, by putting a small amount of Rohypnol in your glass of wine right after you finish the pie course. Tuck yourself in and let less wise people make all the mistakes and get all the herpes. NOT YOU! You’re asleep.
- Don’t be boring. Most of the stupid things I do come out of drinking + boredom. Try a 1000 piece abstract art grayscale puzzle with your family members who have visible cataracts.
- Buy some yarn and those large pick up sticks and watch youtube tutorials of obnoxious twenty-somethings, with Herbal Essence commercial-worthy hair, with excessive orthodontia, and trick yourself into thinking you too could create a cable knit sweater instead of going out and getting into trouble. Just be aware what you will create will look a lot like something your dog vomits up when she gets into the trash
- Buy a new vibrator, a really expensive one with Bluetooth technology so advanced aliens from Magrathea can connect to it from space. A vibrator with so many settings you need a degree from MIT to work it. A vibrator that requires so much energy that you’ll have to connect it to a nuclear reactor in order to power it. As soon as dinner ends get in bed, and go to town on your v like you’re a road worker who has to jackhammer through cement.
- Remember that you didn’t cum then, and you’re not going to cum now. I mean that. I used to hook up with my ex from high school almost every year for five years after we broke up during the holidays and literally every single time we would both lay in the bed staring at the ceiling repeatedly muttering to the other that this is not representative of the sexual gods we had become since separating. Except for one measly time where he actually made me cum and he did like a Super Bowl Sunday touchdown dance and then would send me spontaneous messages about it for the next ten years. Ugh.
- This is a crazy one. Just say no….to the ho. Try to have some self-control for once. Not like the kind of self control when you walk past the donut factory in Chelsea and you’re like..I have two options, I could A) motorboat the entire display case, eating so many donuts that Oompa Loompas will magically appear singing a sarcastic lymeric like, “what do you get when you have no control? Body resembling a Krispee Kreme troll?” Eventually rolling your inflated body home in shame… OR option B) I could just not eat them and keep walking…and I know what you’re thinking….There is literally only one viable option here. Because you will ALWAYS eat the donuts and get rolled home by Oompas, so nevermind you pathetic lard-filled donut graveyard…you’re getting fucked….Just wear a condom at least.
- Have your mouth wired shut temporarily by your dentist
- Chastity belt! Do they have this on amazon prime? Cuz if not, that’s a great business idea. LOCK THAT SHIT UP. This is probably the only one of my suggestions that would work
- Get a makeup artist to airbrush or paint weird semi-permanent (henna moment!) sores and marks on your v so you’ll be too embarrassed for anyone to see it. I’d love to see some Youtube vlogger do a DIY tutorial about that!
- Shave all your pubic hair without shaving cream with an old rusty Bic razor you find in the corner of your gym. If your genitals are covered in razor burn so bad it looks like you have a disease from the 15th century, I doubt you’re gonna show them to anyone.
If you’re single and you’re reading this and you’re thinking to yourself: Listen Zoe, I just need to feel the weight of another person on top of me so I can feel anything other than the crushing weight of the world’s collective loneliness. What does it matter if I hook up with a ghost from my past?
Just trust me, even if you’ve been jerking off so much it looks like you’ve been lifting weights on the pads of your fingers. Even if the last time you went on a date Obama had hope…it’s not an excuse to drown your sorrows in the semen of guys who were the Patient Zero for all your fucked up neuroses about love, sex, and relationships in the first place. So stay strong young Jedi, may the force be with you.