The Honor of a Lifetime

Or, is it many lifetimes?

It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president.”
— President Joe Biden, January 20, 2025

It has been the great honor of my life to serve as president of the Pleasantville Commons Homeowners Association. From ensuring that all homeowners use appropriate window coverings to restricting the type and number of plants they can grow in their gardens, we’ve done important work to keep our neighborhood as uniform, homogeneous, and beige as possible. I hope I’ve been an integral part of that work.

One of the achievements I’m proudest of is the decisive action I took when the Johnson family built a new house that was one foot too close to the property line. Under my leadership, we were able to force the Johnsons to rebuild the back of their house to comply with the strict building regulations that keep our neighborhood as pleasant as it is.

When the Merritts painted the swings on their swing set purple, in flagrant violation of our HOA guidelines, we were able to swiftly ensure that an approved color and brand of paint be applied to the swings. When Hugh Jones let his car sit with a flat tire in his driveway for an entire day, we similarly took immediate corrective action. When Della Pierce broke her foot and was unable to mow her lawn for a month, we levied a fine to discourage such unneighborly behavior in the future.

We have fined homeowners for leaving bikes in their yards, having too many chairs on their front porch, letting their children draw on our sidewalks with chalk, and much more.

I believe I can say that under my leadership, our HOA has risen to new heights of petty regulation and indiscriminate enforcement. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve you.

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It’s the honor of a lifetime to have been selected for the International Underachiever Award of the Year. This is so unexpected; we underachievers rarely rise to the top in any area of endeavor.

Decades of underachieving went into becoming the top underachiever of the year. But I can’t claim all the credit. I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the many people and circumstances that made it possible for me to win this highly coveted award.

First, I must thank my parents, who heartily embraced the laissez-faire parenting common at the time, setting me firmly on my course to becoming a top underachiever. Like many parents who read Dr. Spock, mine didn’t make a fuss about my grades or check if I’d done my homework; they didn’t insist I take music or ballet lessons. My relaxed upbringing gave me the foundational basis for first-class underachieving.

But my parents alone could not guarantee a lifetime of underachieving. They actually had certain expectations of me, like that I’d go to college and get a reasonably good job that I’d enjoy — expectations that I met.

I certainly couldn’t have achieved my level of underachieving without help from many other quarters, too numerous to name. Not the least of these has been my own perfectionism, which I owe to the particular mix of nature and nurture that made me who I am — indeed, much of which may have been determined long before I was born, as Robert Sapolsky would argue.

I also got a major boost toward underachieving from being part of the “Dazed and Confused” generation, or the Flower Children, defined by a laissez-faire zeitgeist and lower stakes than those of, say, the Boomers.

You may wonder, given what I’ve said about basic achievements I’ve made (college, jobs), how I won the title of top underachiever. The answer is that achievements in underachieving are directly related to where you start in life and how hard you have to try. Given my advantages, opportunities, and privileges, I should have achieved far more than I have. It is to that ratio of opportunities to achievements that I most especially owe my underachieving success, and my great honor in accepting this award today.

Thank you.

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It’s the honor of my numerous lifetimes to have been reincarnated as a cat.

What did I do to deserve such an honor? I’ve been through too many forms to count on the wheel of samsara, learning the lessons I had to learn to be elevated to the highest form of being known as Cat.

I’ve been a cockroach, a snail, a toad, a goat. And yes, I’ve been a human.

I recall a human lifetime of mine long ago, in what you call the Middle Ages. I was toiling day and night as an alewife, dealing with drunk troubadours and hermits. Have you ever had to fight off a troubadour who insisted on singing all 20 verses of “Good Neighbor” over and over? It isn’t pretty.

Still, the troubadours and hermits weren’t as bad as the philosophers and priests (or even worse, philosopher-priests) who’d stop by now and then to deliver lectures about my wanton nature as a female. Give me a break.

But I digress. I can’t teach you the lessons I learned during that life or my many others; you must go through whatever lives you need to so that you can learn and truly absorb whatever lessons you need. That’s just how it works.

As for me: At some point, I had learned enough to be reincarnated as a cat. A house cat, at that. It was then that I knew I’d arrived. To be so beautiful, so charming, so irresistible. To be capable of lowering humans’ blood pressure by my mere presence. To be a creature so perfectly designed for hunting — and yet have no need to hunt, because my every need is taken care of by my towering human servants. You see, they have not yet learned, as I have, that size is not everything.

They have so much to learn, so many lifetimes to go. But I have the honor of being a cat, and I can sincerely say it’s the honor of many, many lifetimes.