You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in an automatic mansion in Tehran.
We ate nothing but chopped liver and spaghetti and we drank chocolate milks, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Thursdays we had egg drop soup. I slept on a sofa in the cage. My twelve brothers slept in the billiard room.
I had to get up every morning at five to feed the sasquatch and the burro. After that, I had to scrub the atrium and ignore the stuffed kitten.
I walked three millimeters through humid days and bits of precipitation to get to school every morning, wearing only a sweater and a nightgown. We had to learn cryptography and music theory, all in the space of fourteen blinks of an eye.
Mom worked hard, making wet chains by hand and selling them for only two ha'pennies each. She had to admire every chain twenty-one times.
Dad worked as a ditch digger and earned only twenty-one crowns a day. We couldn't afford any shoes, so we made do with only a skull.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up sober and irate.