It's 5 O'Clock Nowhere
Reporting Live From Dry January
This is satire and to be read with a sense of humor. None of these characters are real, rather just figments of my imagination based on people I know, people I used to know and probably a few different versions of myself (both past and present).
Nobody wants to be in the Miami Airport on New Year's Day, but somehow here she was. "The older you get the faster it goes," people always say. The fact that the date on her phone read 2025 felt like staring this cold, hard, truth dead in the eye. Change had been brewing for months – she couldn't quite put her finger on where exactly she was going, but her world was starting to feel bigger and smaller all at once.
In anticipation of what was to come she had spent the last month of 2024 saying "yes" to anything everything. The Leopard Fendi Baguette of her dreams popping up on 1stDibs? ‘Add to cart!’ A last minute trip to Miami for New Years? ‘Buy the ticket, take the ride!’ A spontaneous 2 martini lunch? ‘What are Fridays for?’ She had zero regrets, but was also dying for some peace and quiet. The unlock to this new level of R&R? Dry January. A sacred chunk of 31 booze-free days that would propel her from being just another hungover girl waiting for a plane to the type of woman who always reads the novel front to back before book club and has a color coded closet.
Drinking was never really her thing to begin with, a few glasses of wine at dinners where she knew she didn't have to set an alarm the next morning, the occasional French75 because she liked the name, and on approximately 2-4 nights of the year she would somehow find herself at a wide open space in Bushwick clutching a G&T, calling an Uber at sunrise thinking to herself: "I'm too old for this shit" and "you'll sleep when you're dead," all at the same time.
The air outside of JFK hit her face like a slap of reality. 2025 was not messing around.
"Come to this party with me on Saturday, I need a wingwoman, and it's an open bar," her friend Elliot texted her.
"I can't, I'm doing dry January! Would you want to take a pottery class with me?"
By January 11th, she really did feel like a new person. Her skin was glowing and her house was immaculate. She made hummus from scratch, put orchids in all 2.5 rooms of her West Village apartment and finished 'My Year Of Rest and Relaxation'.
"Let's go to Raf's tonight," her coworker Summer begged her. It was 4 o'clock in the office and everyone was over it.
"I can't, I have 12 days left of Dry January." She wasn't going to lie, a restaurant sounded fun. There's only so many culinary peaks one can achieve within the limitations of a galley kitchen and air fryer.
"Yeah, duh... so am I," Summer responded, "but this isn't Studio54 in 1977, it's 2025...we can still go to dinner and have the best time."
The dining room at Raf's was bursting with women in TOTEME sweaters, sipping Ghia spritzes around tiny tables all buzzing about how this would be their year. She felt right at home.
"You want to go have a cigarette?," Summer asked while grazing over the dessert menu.
"A cigarette??? Who are you?!"
"Yeah, Ghia Spritz and a cig, it's like a thing."
"Fair enough."
She had listened to enough podcasts to know there was no XYZ-day rule for forming habits, but three weeks in, she was proud of herself for sticking with what she started.
"I'm doing this every year. It's good to have a goal, resetting for the big picture... you know?" she yapped to her therapist.
On the last Saturday in January she woke up to a text from her best friend Annabel time stamped at 2:22AM. The message included nothing but a photo of a Negroni in a dim-lit bar followed by a meme of Carrie Bradshaw being handed a post-it that reads "I'm sorry, I can't, don't hate me."
"Annabel!!!! You didn't!!!!" she texted her. "It's fine- you should still be proud of yourself."
That evening would be her first true night out of the year, a birthday dinner for her college roommate. The party being held was at Odeon felt like a sick joke – her favorite restaurant and home to the best martini in the city. She decided to take the highroad to channel her FOMO into audacity by wearing the most insane Simone Rocha Jacket with a Miu Miu mini-dress. Walking through the doors just before 9PM the room was alive.
"I see my friends," she told the hostess with a smile, gesturing to a big round table in the center of the dining room.
The group erupted with cheer as she sat down at the remaining empty seat.
"Can I have another drink, gin martini... bone dry with a twist!" her friend Julia summoned the server.
"Babe! What do you want?"
Out of the corner of her eye she spotted trays of martini glasses and steak frites dancing through the air to the soundtrack of Saturday night tête-à-tête. "You have 5 days left, but you've also made it 26 days," the devil and the angel bickered on her shoulder.
"And for you?" the server asked with big Bambi eyes.
She twirled the menu in her fingers. "Hiiiii, ummm... I'll have a......"