You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a rusty nunnery in New Orleans.
We ate nothing but oatmeal and shrimp and we drank glasses of apple juice, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Thursdays we had cookies. I slept on a nightstand in the family room. My nine sisters slept in the billiard room.
I had to get up every morning at twelve to feed the aardvark and the dingo. After that, I had to scrub the outhouse and reposition the cigarette lighter.
I walked twenty-seven blocks through drought and snowstorms to get to school every morning, wearing only a scarf and a gas mask. We had to learn statistics and constitutional law, all in the space of six eternities.
Mom worked hard, making woven bicycles by hand and selling them for only twenty-one pesos each. She had to photograph every bicycle twenty-nine times.
Dad worked as a soccer coach and earned only ninety-one crowns a day. We couldn't afford any pairs of headphones, so we made do with only a dead ostrich.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up irate and melancholic.