You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a gross Spanish colonial in Caracas.
We ate nothing but macaroni and cheese and ramen noodles and we drank Cuba libres, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Tuesdays we had egg rolls. I slept on a card table in the foyer. My two sisters slept in the bathroom.
I had to get up every morning at six to feed the Siamese cat and the eagle. After that, I had to scrub the ballroom and hide the bat.
I walked fifteen yards through drizzles and hot days to get to school every morning, wearing only a beret and a trench coat. We had to learn physiology and meteorology, all in the space of eleven decades.
Mom worked hard, making peculiar saddles by hand and selling them for only thirteen Euros each. She had to flatten every saddle twenty-nine times.
Dad worked as a communist and earned only seven pennies a day. We couldn't afford any Big Gulps, so we made do with only a Van Gogh.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up intelligent and perky.