my cpanel box is pretty standard, I have 1gb ram... however I only have roughly 33mb free at all times....

is this normal? is there anything I can do to free up some ram?

you can try optimizing mysql and apache, you really have to check top and such to see whats using the ram to know if you can increase the perfomance, also linux allocates the ram but it isnt always being used, so it will show less free but its dormant.

Top Screenshot

work on editing your my.cnf a bit