Sh*t My Dad Says Read Online Free PDF

touch that knife. YOU never need to be holding a knife…. I don’t give a shit, learn how to butter stuff with a spoon.”
    On Slumber Parties
    “There’s chips in the cabinet and ice cream in the freezer. Stay away from knives and fire. Okay, I’ve done my part. I’m going to bed.”
    On Sharing
    “I’m sorry, but if your brother doesn’t want you to play with his shit, then you can’t play with it. It’s his shit. If he wants to be an asshole and not share, then that’s his right. You always have the right to be an asshole—you just shouldn’t use that right very often.”

It’s Important to Know the Value of a Dollar
    “Let’s just shut the fuck up and eat.”

    Both of my parents grew up poor—my mom, in an underprivileged Italian community on the outskirts of Los Angeles (her mother and father both passed away before she turned fifteen, at which point she and her five siblings were split up between a few different relatives); and my dad, on a farm in Kentucky, where he and his family worked as sharecroppers until he was fourteen and his dad bought the farm.
    “When I had an earache, my mom would piss in my ear to kill the pain,” my dad once told me in an effort to illustrate the depths of his family’s poverty.
    “That just seems weird, Dad. Not something poor people do.”
    “Yeah, maybe that was a bad example,” he said after thinking about it for a moment.
    Regardless, my parents never missed an opportunity to remind me and my brothers that we had it good. “You prance around on your fucking skateboards and bikes like you’re the goddamned Queen of England,” he used to tell us when we spent our weekends goofing off with friends and neglecting our chores.
    Sometimes my parents worried that my brothers and I had it too easy; that we’d grow up not understanding the value of a dollar, or how it feels to struggle. Even before my mom attended law school and began working in poverty law, she spent a lot of her free time volunteering in the poor communities of San Diego. She worked with parents on welfare and with homeless families, organizing after-school programs or helping them become self-sufficient to get off welfare. Anytime I complained about anything, she’d invoke those families.
    “Why aren’t you eating your pasta?” she asked me one night over dinner when I was ten years old.
    “It’s got peas in it,” I replied.
    “So pick out the peas.”
    “Well, you know I don’t like peas, but you put peas in it anyway. Why do you do that?” I whined.
    “Excuse me? You’re treading on thin fucking ice, buddy,” my dad barked, looking up from his plate. “That’s your mother. You and she are not equals. Here’s her,” he said, putting his hand high up above his head, “and here’s you,” he added, putting his other hand well below the table. “If she wants to serve only peas for the rest of fucking eternity you will sit there every goddamned day and eat them and say ‘thank you’ and ask for more.”
    “Why would I ask for more if I hate them?” I said.
    My dad told me to leave the table and go to my room—or at least that’s what I think he said, because he was screaming with a mouth full of peas. About a week later, my mom came home from her law school library a little later than usual to find my brother Evan and me sitting on the couch watching TV a few feet from our dad, who was leaning back in his recliner, half-asleep. She turned off the TV, rousing my dad, and told the three of us that she had an announcement.
    “We’re going to eat what impoverished families eat,” she proclaimed.
    “What does ‘impoverished’ mean?” I whispered to Evan.
    “It means poor people or something,” he said, worry lines spreading over his face like a spiderweb.
    Our mom went on to explain that she had visited the grocery store where some of the poor families she knew through her volunteering shopped with their food stamps. She described the food, how only some of it was