No room for haters in my family tree

Compton can't be as rough and dirty as it claims to be--my mom grew up there!

It's true, I just found that out today. My mom spent the first few years of her life in Compton. Admittedly it was before the gentrification and gangs and whatnot, but the fact remains that my mom grew up in Compton. Take that all you haters!*

Another old old old relative on my father's side was another kind of roughneck. When Oregon was still a territory (or thereabouts, all I can say is that it was long before the Oregon Trail was a popular game), one of my relatives lived in a tree. What do I mean lived in a tree? I mean he hollowed out a tree and lived in it. For two years. He left his family on the east coast, trekked west all the way to rainy Oregon, and spent the next two years clearing out a plot of land to farm while living in the hollow of a giant tree trunk. I don't care who you are, but that is pretty bad-ass. He then sent for his family and built a house for them to live in on their newly hewn farm.

As far as my family history is concerned, I come from pretty hearty stock. On one side I survived the (future) ghetto, on the other I lived like Tom Hanks in a Pacific NW version of Castaway.

Conclusion: wherever I end up in life (both rich and famous with a Nobel prize winning family) nobody can say that I did not earn it. Not even by using reason and facts. No haters, ya'll*

*by "haters" I mean socio-economically down-trodden.