Tankwoman's Tips During Recession

Okay, I know, I know we aren't officially in a recession. The rules for calling the shitty situation that we're all in right now, a recession are complicated. There have to be a certain amount of quarters of negative GDP. There has to be a frightening level of unemployment. Somebody in charge (like Paulsen or Bernanke) has to twirl three times, snap their fingers, and say "...there's no place like home...there's no place like home...there's no place like home..." at which point, we are officially in a recession, and we can all stop feeling crappy about having no money. I mean there's a reason we're broke. We're in a freaking recession! Right now, nobody has any money, and we're thinking that things are just about as bad as they can get, but we're not even in a recession yet. Is it going to be just horrible when we finally call it a recession?

Anyway..I have a few suggestions for you during this rec---, I mean this really shitty situation that we're all in (maybe instead of using the r word, we can just use the acronym RSS). SAVE YOUR LEFTOVERS. If you find yourself with no money until payday, and not enough money to get a pizza for dinner, look around in your cabinets. Yesterday, I had bacon and toast for breakfast. I was going to have eggs, but I only had one, and if you scramble one egg, when it's finished, you get exactly two bites, and that can sometimes just make you more hungry. So it was bacon, and toast, I didn't have any jelly for the toast, so I sprinkled it with a little cinnamon and sugar. It wasn't Smuckers, but it was pretty tasty. Around dinner time, I still didn't have any money for a pizza. I had leftover bacon, and that one egg. I found some flour in the cabinet, so I made a pancake batter with the flour, the egg, some baking powder, a pinch of salt, milk,and a little bit of vegetable oil. Now I was in luck, because I had some milk in the fridge, I usually either have none, or I have milk past the expiration date. I found in the fridge, leftover broccoli, a slice of cheddar cheese, and a slice of onion that wasn't more than a week old, and was free from that fuzzy stuff. I chopped everything, added it to the batter, fried it in a little vegetable oil, and it was the bomb!!! For dessert, I found flour tortillas, and so I toasted them and poured chocolate syrup over the top. Yum.

Here's another tip. If you're seriously depressed or anxious over the economy, AVOID at all costs, the FINANCIAL channels and the NIGHTLY NEWS. The financial channels are all filled with headlines about failing household financial names, declines in triple and double digits, and the scarcity of any real liquid money in the global economy. And don't whatever you do, switch to CNN or ABC. Those stations will be filled with stories of politicians who in order to stop the financial bloodbath, are asking us, the people who don't have enough money for a freaking pizza, for $700 billion dollars, so that we can buy the crappy assets that these belly up financial geniuses can't sell to anybody with half a brain on Wall Street. Switch the channel to Gilligan's Island, or the Brady Bunch, or cartoons. If you have a little weed, (I know, we're in a RSS, who can afford weed?) these shows are better than anything on prime time, since nobody can afford cable anymore.

If you need to buy clothes, and you can't afford to shop, look through the basement. You might have some things there that you haven't worn in a decade, but you can always say that they are retro. If they are a bit worn, you can always say that grunge is coming back, I have a feeling it is, whatever the fashion gurus think.

Be creative. Be optimistic.

Stock up on cheap booze.

| +Save/Share | |