They're all gonna laugh at me

I love getting little "gifts" for free.

In college, I'd scour Web sites and sign up for every free bottle of shampoo and conditioner, every lotion, every coupon, every "buy one, get one" offer I could find -- relevant to my life or not. This would explain the ProAge lotion I have in my closet, which I may have to hand over to an older relative, as my fine lines aren't showing yet. Yet. Just wait.

I stopped looking for all the samples because it takes a lot of time. But now I'm out of shampoo samples. I have no face wash packets to take with me on vacations (you know, the less-than-one vacation I take a year). And I'll be danged if I'm going to spend actual money to buy a small bottle from the Dollar Store or the Target $1 bins, as tempting as they are.

So tonight, I went and found all these useless samples, wasting time I could've spent ... OK, so I really didn't have anything better to do. But I was feeling really great, like "Wow, look at all this cool, new, free stuff!"

And then the fear hit me, and caused me to stop my frugal search and close my browser windows.

I'm going to be that person. You know the one. The one who collects coupons like it's my job. When I die, people will go through my bulging purse and discover coupons that expired 25 years before my death. And they will point and laugh.

Well. I suppose it's slightly better than collecting, like, moth balls or something. Oh, God. I'm so ashamed (so I'll just tell the Internet all about it).

Ugh.