The only occasions I have ever successfully quit smoking for any remarkable amount of time, a few months perhaps, it has been by replacing the addiction with another. This is exactly the wrong thing to do, mind, but it’s also the only thing that works for me. The first time I quit, when I was 17, it was by popping NoDoz like candy. Every time I craved a cigarette, boom, a quick 200 mg of caffeine took my mind off of it. I lost 60 pounds, my grades improved, my house was spotless, and I developed a permanent twitch. It got to the point I’d take two at a time and chew them. I started smoking again when I started having chest pains.

When I was 19, I tried to replace it with a healthy habit, namely exercise. I managed to find something so obscenely low-impact that it overcame my deep seated revulsion for physical exertion. I would sit watching music videos until 4:00 in the morning, endlessly lifting a 20-pound weight until I was exhausted enough to go to sleep. I added a few leg lifts and squats when I noticed my disproportionately developed arms and shoulders, but nothing so strenuous as to distract from the theoretically somnolence-inspiring television. I stopped this when I realized that the nicotine craving-induced insomnia wasn’t going away, and the nocturnal exercise was further reinforcing my creature-of-the-night ways. My college, damn the luck, did not offer midnight classes.

At 22, fully embroiled in a relationship, another alternative offered itself: sex. Morning, noon and night, and a few times in between. The sad and scandalous truth was too soon discovered, though, that even gay men can have enough of sex. (”Baby, I’m not prudish at all. Really. I think I may have given you a wrong impression of my upbringing. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I really don’t mind if you masturbate.”)

So now, at age 24 and faced with the facts that 1) I’m getting no younger, 2) I spend way too much money on antihistamines and decongestants, and that 3) frankly cigarettes are fucking expensive too, what new hell shall I inflict upon myself in the name of self-improvement? Shall I drink myself to sleep every night so I don’t just sit there staring at the ceiling twitch twitch twitch? Meditate and smudge herbs, calling upon whatever powers are associated with “Hey, guy, don’t slowly kill yourself” to give me strength and patience and the fortitude not to bludgeon someone to death on a daily basis? Or shall I just spend way too much time on the internet, devoting my life to failed redesigns of my weblog, pondering the seemingly complete incomprehensibilty of Wordpress, and prattling on about privy details of my utterly trite personal life?