You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a plastic nunnery in Macedonia.
We ate nothing but pie a la mode and dry toast and we drank glasses of orange juice, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Wednesdays we had hors d'oeuvre. I slept on an ironing board in the salon. My three sisters slept in the boiler room.
I had to get up every morning at seven to feed the gerbil and the parrot. After that, I had to scrub the auditorium and describe the sponge.
I walked nine centimeters through periods of warm weather and windy days to get to school every morning, wearing only a thong and a tunic. We had to learn astronomy and geneaology, all in the space of nineteen minutes.
Mom worked hard, making chic Rubik's cubes by hand and selling them for only nineteen yuans each. She had to spin every Rubik's cube six times.
Dad worked as a school principal and earned only forty-four cents a day. We couldn't afford any skulls, so we made do with only a floppy disk.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up comely and precocious.