Things to do while you’re not smoking:

1. Try not to think about smoking.
2. Try not to imagine, for example, that satisfying crackling noise the tobacco leaves make burning from a long hard drag.
3. Work out a time, if necessary, when you will let yourself have a ciggie, and then try to postpone that.
4. Eat Skittles.
5. Eat salted carrot sticks until your stomach hurts. This happens surprisingly quickly.
6. Eat Twizzler Sourz until the citric sour grind hurts your teeth. This happens surprisingly quickly.
7. Consider taking up a new addiction. Alcohol. It’s at least more sociable. Recreational drugs? At least they are less vilified.
8. Missing that oral fixation, tap your front teeth with your thumb nail deliriously.
9. Play interminably with an elastic band; with the hand you are not using to tap your teeth.
10. Try to remind yourself why you are quitting. Even if, not quite yet, you can’t breathe or smell or taste better, even if you still have a cough, even if there appears to be no increased circulation in your fingers, toes, or genitals.
11. Continue trying not to think about smoking.
12. Chew pens.
13. Keep a running total of how much money you are saving so you can buy yourself something nice. You’ve always wanted a Faberge egg.
14. Think about all the people who said that you couldn’t; or, perhaps worse, people who said that you could but in a more existential way that meant, well, if Jesus could walk on water, yes, I suppose you could quit smoking. Think how terrible it will be if they are right. Think how very satisfying it will be to make those smug sons o’ bitches wrong.
15. Start practicing your sanctimonious ex-smoker act. What else have you got?
16. Search out a smoker and stand really really close to him or her.
17. Keep busy and distracted. Write silly lists if you have to.

Ah, nuts. Self-improvement is masturbation and self-discipline is overrated.

SS