Hubris

Pretty tired today... I had plans to introduce the merry band of circus performers who will be going on the trip to China, and thus appearing in this diary over the next few weeks, for your reference and edification, but not today.  I do have plans to "live-blog" (did I really just use that word?) the travel to China itself as best I can, starting at around 3:30 a.m. EDT on Wednesday.  I know you'll all want to set your alarms for that one so you can sit close by your computers and wait for the updates as they come in. 

But today I don't have anything much to say.  I was ruminating this morning on the fact that I will meet my son in exactly a week, and remembering the same feeling I had before my first two children were born:  just who do I think I am, anyway?  I mean, doesn't it take some brass f***ing balls to think that you should be a parent?  What makes me think I should be entrusted with a little kid, who will then grow up imitating my bad habits, inheriting my pessimistic and jaded worldview, successfully copying my inability to throw a ball properly, and will probably end up someday thinking that somebody on the Internet (or Etherspheroid, or whatever they'll be calling it then) would be interested in his aimless thoughts randomly jotted down?  Why do I think I would be any good at parenting -- more to the point, what gives me the right to do it at all?

Hubris, maybe.  "Excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance" says the English dictionary.  And then there's the more interesting meaning of the original Greek hybris:  "Presumption against the gods."  That sounds about right.  Icarus, Arachne, Oedipus, Ajax, etc.  All proud, all cured of it with good old-fashioned divine comeuppance.  Odysseus is another one.  Got away from the Cyclops and couldn't resist crowing about it, taunting the blinded monster, telling it his name so it would know exactly who had got the best of it; so Poseidon says all right, you think you're so great, try wandering the ocean for 20 years while all your friends die and your wife and son grow old and you go half-crazy.  Still feeling cocky?  Would you rather plummet to your death, get turned into a spider, be blinded and unwittingly sleep with your mother, or just plain be smote with lightning?  All fitting ends for the overly proud, apparently.  I forgot Sisyphus.  There's a happy fellow too.   

We flirt with similar forces when we choose to be parents, meddling in cosmic affairs with a frightful, and perhaps even idiotic, lack of humility.  It seems breathtaking that we've got the guts to do it at all.

The mind takes weird turns when it's tired.  Back tomorrow with (hopefully) a lot more lucid thoughts and a lot less Greek mythology.  Peace.