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Wondering where to find the perfect, affordable couch? Too cheap to pay for a real therapist to help you determine why you’re a promiscuous, alcoholic skank? Send your secrets / questions / rants to frugal[at]frugalfag[dot]com and your issue will probably be answered/exploited right here on this site!

The FrugalFag Manifesto

Every weekday morning, I, like 100 million other Americans, get up because some clock tells me it’s time to go to work. I get up earlier than I want to. I take a shorter shower than I want to, and I eat breakfast faster than I want to. I commute to work for longer than I want to, and I sit hunched over a computer all day. I read e-mails that tell me something I already know or don’t need to know, but I usually have to get to the end of the e-mail before that becomes apparent. I cut and paste stuff from one window to another and I fill out a lot of forms. I have only been a member of the American workforce for half a decade, and I want out.

The problem isn’t that I hate my job. It’s not that I think life would be perfect if only I could spend my days surveying Yellowstone from a park ranger’s watchtower or teaching inner-city kids that they can be president by having them write bad poetry. It’s not the cutting and pasting and the forms and the sense that what I’m doing isn’t changing the world. It’s that working, in general, sucks. I don’t just want to get up an hour later. I want to throw my alarm clock out the window and only get up when I’m so disgusted with my own morning breath that I can’t bare to lie in bed any more. I want to eat breakfast without glancing at that damn clock on the stove—or the one on the microwave or the coffee maker. I want to make a big, impractical breakfast with bacon, pancakes, and eggs, or just go out to eat and let someone else make it for me. And I don’t want to just take the day off and do it this Thursday. I want this to be just the way things are.

Unfortunately, as much as I would like to spend every morning at IHOP, those cream-cheese blintzes ain’t free. And neither is a cell phone or high-speed Internet access or electricity. And since I’m not willing to live without those things, I work. And I save. And I daydream about how it will be when I can leave the full-time grind and downgrade to a part-time gig that is relatively fulfilling and covers some of my basic expenses.

Of course, I’m not going to give up on the delusion that one day someone will rescue me from mediocrity with a book deal or my own TV show. And I’m not too good for expanded basic cable, so tell your friends at Bravo, Oxygen, WE, Logo, and the Style Network that I’m full of ideas. Perhaps a show in which I help people in financial crises turn their lives around with my own unique brand of sassy attitude, which I like to call Sassitude™. Or perhaps a reality show in which people try to survive on minimum wage without giving up their flair for fashion or interior design? I’m up for anything, especially if the intro credits include me throwing fake money into the air and brushing Arabian horses while the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams plays in the background.