…and I’m not talking about the Old Testament here. I’m talking about being cheap and saving money.

See, I love saving money…almost more than I love having money. There’s just something about getting that deal that just turns my crank. I blame the Jewishness. Or maybe it’s because I’m completely out of my mind. Either way, that’s just sorta the way it is.

(EXCEEDINGLY BORING STORY ALERT. And no, it’s not about pennies or dentists appointments)

For example, last year my friend Noah gave me a Gap “Friends and Family” discount card, which entitled me to 30% off my entire purchase there. So naturally, I gathered up some friends, and we all rolled down there a bought a ton of stuff. (Actually, I think I ended up going there twice; first purchasing some stuff, and then later returning said stuff for other stuff). It was cool because in addition to the 30%, I also got the “The Cashier is Gay and thinks I’m cute” discount, which I readily accept after years of listening to bitches talk about crying to get out of speeding tickets (actually, I think he just gave me his employee discount, but the point is that I ended up getting closer to 55% off than 30%).

This time, it was my friend Simone who provided the Friends and Family postcard. But there was a twist: For every $75 you spend, you get a free $15 gift card. Bonus! The question remained, however: would we be able to spend enough to get a couple of those gift cards? Because if they compute the amount you “spent” after they apply the discount, you actually have to find a little over $108 worth of crap to get your $15 gift card (and, of course, $216 to get two). So, I set about on a mission: find $150 worth of crap and pray that they gave us the (two) gift cards before they did the discount.

Now, Simone stole a little of my thunder by telling me she gave out the cards before applying the discount as a matter of course, without really thinking about it, but I’d like to think my flirting played a part in the cashier — female this time — hooking us up. It certainly didn’t hurt that I named dropped “Bogart”, the gay cashier who’d hooked me up the year before. (She especially like my stories about how whenever I’d be in the dressing room trying on clothes, I’d overhear him telling some story about the latest club he’d been to in WeHo, and who he saw there, etc etc).

At any rate, our total (pre-discount) ended up being $151 and change. After the discount, we ended up getting $150 worth of crap for $96 (plus tax), as well as $30 in gift cards. So now if I’m generically fashionable this winter, you can thank Simone, the nice folks at the Gap, and a battalion of impoverished Cambodian slave-children.

I’ll spare you the story of how I gave the manager at McDonalds my name so I could come back and get the complimentary $1 “arch card” I was owed for ordering a 5 piece “Chicken Selects”. Apparently they were out of the boxes that have the cards on them. I don’t want to pack too much fun into one post.