waste not, want lots

oh god. i feel like i'm turning into my mother, which, for those of you who don't know my mother, is about the worst feeling in the entire universe. my mother is the cheapest person alive. she is stingy with everything (including love, sniff sniff), and she calculates her quality of life by using a simple, but mind-rattling formula based on how much money she can keep stuffed in envelopes under her mattress. these are not envelopes that she's purchased- these are the envelopes that the junk mail comes in, which she also finds a use for. due to this frugality, she hasn't bought a pad of paper in over thirty years. i don't think she's bought a new pair of shoes in close to twenty years, and she only goes to the theater if she can go to the dollar show and sneak into two other movies afterwards. "that's each movie for thirty-three cents," she'll boast as she drinks her off-brand cola. "you can't flush your money down the shitter."

my dad's got a lot of the same tightwad habits, but not to the same scratch-out-your-eyeballs extreme. and now as i go over my finances with a fine toothed comb bought from the goodwill for only ten cents, i see that i am on my way to becoming totally nancy-fied; the metamorphoses will be complete when i start melting four small crayon stubs together to create one lumpy but mostly usable larger crayon. i've been evaluating my spending; why have i been buying x brand of dish detergent when i can get y brand for twenty cents less? why am i throwing away old socks when i can use those as dish rags? my god, i'm ready to slit my wrists. why am i driving myself so crazy? it's this house, this house which i know i can afford but am afraid that, well, maybe i can't afford. so why am i throwing away all those slivers of soap when i can squish them together to create something roughly bar-sized, thus saving thirty-nine cents?

please kill me.

i got a book from the library on all these money saving tips. retail value, thirty bucks. if you're looking to save money, why would you buy a thirty dollar book? who would bother publishing something like that if their target market is people who save bath water for other uses, people who cut their dryer sheets into four strips as to make the box last four times as long? it's making my head hurt to read this stuff, and i feel like just being exposed to these tightwad tips is driving me off the deep end. to save on postage, mail your bills out with your neighbor's bill as wells. if four people share an envelope, each mailer only spends ten cents on postage, thus saving about thirty.

thirty cents. i think i'd rather spend the whole thirty-nine cents than have to face the humiliation of approaching my neighbors and tell them i don't want to dish out what amounts to the spare change i could probably find in my couch.

also in the book- how to make a jump rope out of old bread bags. that's one thing my mother never did, although she did once make two small hats out of an old bra. what an embarrassing bus ride to school that was.

oh, but at least i still have my humor.

kill me.