Habit: Smoking You’ve tried nicotine patches, nicotine gums, nicotine suppositories, and you’re still sucking back smoke. If you’re undeterred by the documented risks of cancer, heart trouble, emphysema, and impotence, maybe you need a brand-new drug—the medication Zyban, when combined with the patch, has proved effective with even the most incurable butt fiends.

Habit: Biting your nails
That dream of becoming a hand model will stay just that—a fabulous, but elusive, dream—if you continue to cannibalize yourself. Try painting your nails with foul-tasting yet invisible Thum Liquid. If that doesn’t work, call (503) 848-8827, ext. 39. You’ll see.

Habit: Chronic masturbation
Hand jive keeping you home on Saturday nights? Some psychologists prescribe satiation therapy: After your, um, reward, keep banging away for another 20 minutes. It won’t be long before you start associating the act with pain and displeasure. Now all you need is a shrink.

Habit: Eating junk food
“If you salivate when you think of a Big Mac, distract yourself by thinking of something equally pleasurable,” says Dr. Tony Farrenkopf, a clinical psychologist specializing in addiction therapy. We like to envision Anna Kournikova slowly eating a banana…Damn! Another 20 minutes!

Habit: Gambling
“The excitement of unpredictable rewards keeps gamblers going,” says Dr. Peter Lamal, associate professor emeritus of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “They’re often people who are thrill-seeking.” For cheaper thrills, try bungee jumping—or for true unpredictability, Russian roulette.

Habit: Checking out women’s breasts
If there’s a cure, do you really want it?

Habit: Swearing
You could deposit change in a jar every time you utter a naughty, but psychologists have proved that people respond better to rewards than punishments. So deposit money every day you don’t swear and you’ll have lots of dough to blow on cigarettes while you try to stop masturbating with all those fucking breasts everywhere.

Habit: Incessantly reciting Monty Python dialogue
1) Sharpen a steak knife. 2) Cut out your tongue. 3) Feed it to the dog.

Hockey Going top shelf looks cool, but if you want to score, keep that shot where most NHL goals go—right along the ice. Start with the puck on the heel of the stick, not the toe, and sweep it forward. Keep your follow-through low and the puck will follow.

Golf Don’t golf the way you dance: Less is more. Rely on the big muscles in your legs and shoulders by keeping your wrists and hands firm, not flexible. Now shorten the back swing, Tiger. Take what feels like a three-quarter backswing; it’s more than enough.

Basketball Pistol Pete Maravich’s father made him dribble a basketball out the window of a moving car with his left hand. The point: Players who can handle the ball with both hands force defenders to respect both sides. Start with the crossover dribble, right to left, then work your way up to a left-only dribble. Soon you’ll have the lay-up, Shaq.

Baseball You swing your hardest and barely manage to pop out to second? Stop swinging with only your arms. Start with your knees bent, your butt down, and your bat cocked. Now step toward the ball, open your hips toward the pitcher, and then swing your arms around like you’re cracking a whip.

Ulysses
The story: Leopold Bloom wanders Dublin, thinking about sex and roast kidney.
Your line: “The multilinear narrative structure reflects Joyce’s fascination with the ‘ineluctable modality of time.’”

War and Peace
The story: Napoleon comes. Napoleon goes. Everyone else dies eloquently and very slowly.
Your line: “Tolstoy’s epic struggles with the Russian psyche’s grand fatalism, spanning generations as he distills the spirit of a people.”

The Great Gatsby
The story: Gatsby (the American Dream) is in love with a girl named Daisy (money). He throws great parties.
Your line: “Fitzgerald’s obsession with America as self-fulfilling prophecy is tempered by his narrator’s storied cynicism.”

The Divine Comedy
The story: Dante travels through hell, purgatory, and heaven. The fun people are in hell.
Your line: “Dante’s recasting of the epic in a Christian ideology allows for the recontextualization of heroic suffering as a paradigm of sin and forgiveness.”

The Sun Also Rises
The story: Jake Barnes travels through Spain getting drunk and trying to get with Lady Brett, usually at the same time.
Your line: “Hemingway’s sparse prose belies his fascination with the complexity of human interaction and the descriptive texture of what he leaves unsaid.”

The Canterbury Tales
The story: A bunch of pilgrims go to Canterbury on a medieval road trip, taking turns telling amusing tales.
Your line: “The breadth of Chaucer’s literary context combines with the social diversity of his characters to present a precociously Renaissance worldview.”

Great Expectations
The story: Pip the orphan falls in love with rich girl Estella. About 400 pages later, they get together.
Your line: “The narrative’s moral tension is reflective of Dickens’ own struggle with ethics in the Victorian societal construct.”

The Sound and the Fury
The story: Three brothers are all pretty messed up. Everyone in the South is unhappy when they’re not sipping sarsaparilla.
Your line: “Faulkner’s fluctuating stream of consciousness underscores a fluid narrative trajectory through the stratified layers of family and history.”

The Prince
The story: The end justifies the means; or, break all the rules, so long as you look good.
Your line: “Machiavelli’s cunning absolutism molded European politics while capitalism began imposing its amoral efficiencies on Western thought.”

Death of a Salesman
The story: Willy the traveling salesman measures his worth by how many people like him. Nobody does, so he commits suicide.
Your line: “Willy’s self-destruction serves Miller as an existential voyage to the corrupted heart of the American soul.”

Faust
The story: The Renaissance Man gets bored and summons a devil, not to be mistaken with Gretchen (a woman).
Your line: “Devil with a blue dress, blue dress, blue dress, devil with a blue dress on…Come on, help me, people…”

Take out the garbage.
For the love of God, throw out those coed naked lacrosse T-shirts—the ones that used to be white but are now a pale shade of dog piss. Throw out all your shoes that aren’t brown or black. Throw out anything with holes in it, stains on it, buttons off of it (you’ll never fix them), and anything with even a stitch of paisley.

Be a lazy son of a bitch.
Calling a personal shopper may sound like something you’d only do after sex-change surgery, but it’s actually the most painless way to buy clothes. Macy’s By Appointment (800-343-0121), for example, will shop for you…for free. “We just ask you a few questions over the phone, and all you have to do is show up,” says founder Linda Lee. And try stuff on, of course. If that’s too much hassle, just buy what the mannequins are wearing. Professionals are paid to pick clothes that attract customers, so sponge off their hard work. Plus, you’ll look far better in the duds—you have a head.

Go to the source.
If there were no women to impress, we’d still be wearing pelts—so take their advice. Ask a woman to come shopping with you, and buy everything she likes—her cute friends will probably agree with her. Shopping solo is even better. Ask the hottest woman in the store for her opinion (the least-used but easiest pick-up line). And if a woman compliments you on your shirt, take note—hell, clear out a section in your closet for it—then wear it once a week.

Jump in feet first.
We love women; women love shoes. Who cares why? To impress them, you’re going to need to pay attention to what’s on your feet. “Buy two new pairs of shoes: one brown and one black,” says Kenneth Cole representative David Stewart. “Make one a sleek leather ankle boot with a side zipper that can be worn with a pair of jeans or a suit, and the other a lace-up Oxford dress shoe.” And don’t scuff them to shit, either. Keep those kicks polished and they’ll outlast your hair.

Car insurance: Take a defensive-driving course, buy an antitheft device, and tell your insurer you take the bus. Also, raising your deductible from $250 to $500 will lower your rate.

Credit cards: Call your company and ask them to lower your APR. No, really. They lowered ours by 3.5 percent on the spot. Now call to cancel your account. They dropped ours by another 5 percent just to keep our business.

Electricity: Just leaving a stereo, computer, and VCR on all the time costs you $300 a year. Vacuuming the coils on your fridge and air conditioner will increase their efficiency. Ka-ching!

Heating: Seal the joints of your ducts with duct tape (hence the name). Up to 30 percent of the heat produced by your furnace is escaping through your shameful leaky duct joints.

Gasoline: According to the Department of Energy, you get your best fuel economy at 65 mph. Just one hour at 70 costs you $5. And lay off the A/C: It chugs your fuel.

7:00 A.M. Don’t hit the snooze bar! Your first duty: Pick up the phone and call in sick. You’ve got more important things to do today than go to work, the first two being a shower and a relaxing breakfast.

7:30 Since you’re just going to hit the couch anyway, go ahead and take the time to program that universal remote. And set the clock on your VCR while you’re at it.

7:45 Write a universal e-mail to all the people you never call. Just give a short description of your doings and add a line of personalized text. My, aren’t you a conscientious friend?

8:30 Update your resumé. No one ever does it until he needs to, and every single person regrets it. When your company goes under, you’ll be the first guy on the hiring block.

9:15 Order a copy of your credit report. If there are any mistakes, you can order an investigation now, online, months before you’re on your knees begging for a loan.

9:45 Have a beer! It’s not even 10:00, and you’ve already done more than most people get done in a week.

10:00 Renew your Maxim subscription. Get one for your younger brother while you’re at it.

10:30 How many times have you forgotten your girlfriend’s birthday? Place orders for the rest of the year—birthdays, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc.

11:00 Open your calendar and use a travel site to plan a vacation today—not only will it be cheaper, but you’ll have a trip to look forward to through all those days of drudgery at work.

11:31 Go to your bank’s Web site and set up an online account that will pay your bills each month automatically. If your bank is still trading in bales of cotton and hasn’t discovered that wacky Internet, try an external site.

12:00 P.M. Hop in the car and get rolling. Stop at the post office and buy a metric shitload of stamps. On your way out, give all those chipper postal workers the finger—they’ll never remember you a year from now anyway.

12:30 Wow, you’re working hard! That’s why it’s nothing but the best for you—hit the drive-through for lunch.

1:00 Buying toilet paper regularly is a mistake. Don’t stop wiping your ass—just buy it in mass quantities. While you’re at the store, stock up on soap, light bulbs, batteries, whiskey, etc.—and new underwear, too.

1:30 Got a favorite wine? Buy a case of it; now you’re ready for company and dinner parties. Dispense with last-minute gift hassles by wrapping up copies of your favorite books, a classic CD, or a stylish fish tie.

2:00 Stop off at Kinko’s and photocopy every credit card and piece of identification in your wallet. You’ll thank us when it gets stolen—assuming you don’t catch us.

2:15 Take your car to the shop and get your oil changed. Have them check out the filters, spark plugs, fluids, belts, and battery, and rotate your tires, too. Hurry up! You need to get home quick or you’ll miss…

4:00 Dukes of Hazzard reruns on The Nashville Network.

4:30 Go through the clothes your girlfriend left at your place, and write down all her measurements. Keep them in your wallet in case you need to buy a gift…or if one of our fact checkers calls.

5:00 You don’t have time to cook. Call and order a pizza for dinner. Then call back five minutes later from a pay phone and have another 50 sent to your boss’ office.

5:10 Take the liquid Drano we forgot to tell you to buy while you were at the store, and dump it in all your sinks and bathtubs. Yes, we know they’re not clogged. Now they’ll stay that way.

5:20 You know that hot new restaurant where you can never get a table? Pick a day three months down the road and make reservations for two. Now you’ve got plenty of time to try to get yourself a date, too.

6:00 Decrease your telemarketer calls by writing: Direct Marketing Association, Telephone Preference Service, P.O. Box 9014, Farmingdale, NY 11735-9014. Include your phone number, dummy.

6:32 You can also cut a chunk of your junk mail by sending a letter to: Direct Marketing Association, Mail Preference Service, P.O. Box 9008, Farmingdale, NY 11735-9008.

7:00 P.M. Finally, the most important thing you never get around to: Call your mom. She’s kind of, well, starved for attention. Tell her we said hi, wouldja?