Hard-boiled

For the first ten years in my life I tried hard to be hard-boiled. Well, I blew it. Then for the next decade I tried at least to appear to be hard-boiled. I didn't succeed in that, either. So from the age of twenty up to the present I worked hard to be a man beyond this whole hard-boiled issue. This time, it worked. By now I am so pissed off just by the word itself that it took me a whole month of preparations simply to bring up the tolerance needed for writing this passage – and it's almost used up again. So fuck hard-boiled, no more mention of it in the pages and affairs to come!