So That’s How Cheap I Am

I have always wondered just how cheap I am.

This past weekend I found out.

I penny-pinched my way through grad school, I spent summers where my permanent address changed every 3 days because I was crashing on a rotating cast of couches, and I survived for a year in New York City on what could barely be called a salary in the name of public service.  Let’s just say I know my way around a cup of ramen and how to turn free happy hour appetizers into a meal for two days.

These days I like to think that I’m just like Lorelai Gilmore, turning my tiny house into a bastion of shabby chic with my impeccable sense of kitsch and irony despite my lesser financial means.  Indeed, like Lorelai, I’ve even secured myself a connection for top-notch coffee every morning for way under market price (and by that I mean free).  Much as Lorelai had Luke, I have a co-worker who I’ve essentially forced into giving me some of his freshly Chemex brewed super premium coffee every morning by sitting in his office and monologuing about utter nonsense until he shoves a cup in my face to make me go away.  In case you hadn’t picked up on it already, my brain is a wild jungle full of scary gibberish.

Seriously, do this and someone will jam free fancy coffee at you before you can take a breath:

This weekend, my frugality hit an all-time high.

The time had come for my close friends and neighbors to move their youngest son out of his crib.  They had ordered a new bedroom set for the little dude, and they needed to figure out what to do with their very lovely and lightly used crib, changing table, and baby bookshelf.

Despite the fact that I am not pregnant, have not mentioned a desire to get pregnant, and was generally useless when it came to helping them with their infant sons, they decided that they wanted to give their baby furniture to me.  They wanted to send it to a nice home in my garage, where it could  just hang out until my hypothetical child is ready to use it. No pressure.

Do you hear that 30-something-year-old ovaries?  There may be a crib in your garage, but you are not to feel any pressure about needing to fill it.  No pressure at all.  Just ignore the crib that you have to walk by every day.  IGNORE IT.

My initial reaction upon receiving this extraordinarily generous and kind offer of free baby furniture looked a little bit like Ross did after Rachel told him that she was pregnant.  It was all blank stares, open mouths, and crazy eyes up in my world.  I’m fairly certain that I also said “I, ummm, I’m just, I don’t know, I don’t understand, um, how this happened.”

But, after pulling myself together, I did some frugalista math.  Baby furniture is really expensive.  And the stuff my friends had bought is WAY nicer than anything that I could ever put together for my hypothetical baby.  And, I mean, sure, one day I will probably have a baby and that baby will probably need a place to sleep.  And, again, this was an incredibly generous and kind offer on their part, knowing that Country Boy and I could use the help, and I needed to stop acting like such a complete arsehole.

So, despite my possession of a crib sending me into a state of frozen anxiety, panic, and utter confusion, I decided to move all of that baby-riffic furniture into my garage.  Because I needed my friends to understand how nice and generous I think they are.  And, mainly, because it was free.

I am willing to intentionally inflict severe emotional distress upon myself for years in order to save money.

So that’s how cheap I am.