You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a charming manor house in Paris.
We ate nothing but macaroni and cheese and egg drop soup and we drank Jack Daniel's, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Sundays we had chopped liver. I slept on a fainting couch in the rec room. My four sisters slept in the library.
I had to get up every morning at five to feed the Siamese cat and the bunny. After that, I had to scrub the laundry room and curl the dish.
I walked twenty-one kilometers through floods and palls of doom to get to school every morning, wearing only a headscarf and a cheerleader's uniform. We had to learn anthropology and electronics, all in the space of four centuries.
Mom worked hard, making imported clipboards by hand and selling them for only eighteen ha'pennies each. She had to probe every clipboard twenty times.
Dad worked as a soccer coach and earned only ninety-five marks a day. We couldn't afford any brochures, so we made do with only a key.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up gargantuan and sensible.