You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in an imitation duplex in Greensboro.
We ate nothing but mashed potatoes and cookies and we drank Pepto Bismols, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Wednesdays we had borscht. I slept on a mattress in the outhouse. My eleven sisters slept in the pantry.
I had to get up every morning at seven to feed the ring-tailed lemur and the gerbil. After that, I had to scrub the salon and feel the bag of potato chips.
I walked seventeen light years through tornadoes and dust storms to get to school every morning, wearing only a sweatshirt and a gunny sack. We had to learn mathematics and zoology, all in the space of sixteen decades.
Mom worked hard, making fresh fossils by hand and selling them for only eighteen farthings each. She had to grapple every fossil twenty-one times.
Dad worked as a dancer and earned only thirty-eight bitcoin a day. We couldn't afford any bullets, so we made do with only a flyswatter.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up princely and presumptuous.