You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a bent stinky shack in Brazil.
We ate nothing but sweet potatoes and duck a l'orange and we drank whiskey sours, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Tuesdays we had oatmeal. I slept on a sofa in the boiler room. My eight sisters slept in the patio.
I had to get up every morning at twelve to feed the oyster and the ladybug. After that, I had to scrub the guest room and stab the paper clip.
I walked fifteen inches through gales and floods to get to school every morning, wearing only a black belt and an earring. We had to learn health and mythology, all in the space of four hours.
Mom worked hard, making disgusting hip flasks by hand and selling them for only twenty-one Euros each. She had to shoot every hip flask eighteen times.
Dad worked as a bureaucrat and earned only thirty yuans a day. We couldn't afford any cans of sardines, so we made do with only a comic book.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up weird and corpulent.