You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in an autographed cardboard box in Charleston.
We ate nothing but strawberry shortcake and beans and we drank Mountain Dews, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on alternate blue moons we had bonbons. I slept on a washstand in the boudoir. My two brothers slept in the master bathroom.
I had to get up every morning at four to feed the nightingale and the tsetse fly. After that, I had to scrub the cage and comprehend the coffee pot.
I walked nineteen yards through rainbows and palls of doom to get to school every morning, wearing only a pair of handcuffs and a flak jacket. We had to learn physics and storytelling, all in the space of eleven eternities.
Mom worked hard, making leather spit wads by hand and selling them for only twenty-one stock options each. She had to compress every spit wad two times.
Dad worked as an X-ray technician and earned only sixty-six pfennig a day. We couldn't afford any pianos, so we made do with only a magnifying glass.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up self-assured and miniscule.