AS with shapes in clouds or lockdowns in Bondi, the concept of "responsibility" can be open for interpretation.
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While one person may accept some challenges as universal, another may sympathise more with the view taken by Dirk Diggler and Reed Rothchild's solipsistic, "industry jargon"-spouting record producer in Boogie Nights: "That's not an MP, that's a YP, your problem."
Climate change comes to mind, as does doing the dishes in a university share house.
To be born with a strong sense of responsibility can sometimes feel as if to be doomed to a wretched existence of disappointment and unrequited martyrdom, and escaping this burden is nigh impossible.
Like the murder-suicide scorpion which stings the frog carrying it across the river, responsibility is simply in one's nature.
I still remember a chat show interview with Guy Pearce from years ago when the actor explained how he'd always been shadowed by the urge to be responsible. Indeed, Pearce has good reason to feel this way. He was only eight when his father, a test pilot, died in a plane crash and his sister has Cornelia de Lange syndrome, a genetic developmental disorder. Pearce was also a teenage bodybuilding champion, indicating discipline counts among his many admirable character traits. Trying to articulate this innate impulse for awareness and control, Pearce said something along the lines of people like him could be face down in the gutter on a bender yet something inside would still be sober enough to remind them tomorrow was bin night.
Unlike Pearce, I can't claim any profound childhood upheaval or even a decent set of pecs, but, like him, I never forget to put the bins out, either.
I'm cursed with responsibility.
I don't think I'm a killjoy or a bore. I've had my fair share of hedonistic moments, yet even these have been tempered by the competing force of culpability. I've abandoned my body and mind to mosh pits with thousands of other young people, who, thanks to a cocktail of, among other things, hormones, pheromones and amplified electric guitar, couldn't care less if the world ended right there and then. Unfortunately, unlike the majority of those grungy '90s nihilists bouncing around the dance floor, I'd be the one to snap out of it, concerned for the girl who'd dropped her wallet or even the bass player up on stage who, for some reason, didn't seem to be enjoying himself as much as his bandmates (then again, maybe that's just bass players).
MORE B. R. DOHERTY
Before concerts, there was amusement parks and during my one and only visit to Australia's Wonderland, my maiden voyage on the pirate ship was ruined because I spent the entire time on the pendulous rite of passage for NSW children of the '80s trying to convince the kid freaking out in the seat next to me he wasn't going to die (I wasn't even sure he was wrong).
But as inimical as pathological responsibility is to having fun, responsibility geeks like me wouldn't have it any other way.
I'm not in awe, nor wish I could be more like those for whom the rules don't seem to apply. Children in adult bodies, like the former housemate who'd stash piles of mouldy dishes under his biohazard of a bed, are, in my eyes, malformed and pathetic, often rescued (and recused) from grown-up realities by partners with mutations of the Florence Nightingale syndrome or misfirings of the parental impulse.
Kids tend to be singled out for the double-edged branding of responsibility during primary school. They're the ones given the task of cleaning the blackboard, stacking the chairs after assembly, or passing a note from the teacher to the principal while resisting the temptation to read it (Please give the needy, insufferable know-it-all delivering this message a smiley stamp or something).
And sure, these pre-adolescents may end up being primary school captains (in my case, vice ... a travesty, on many levels) but they also often end up without any friends.
Parents, like Machiavellian year six teachers, are also quick to exploit the "responsible child".
We have three kids and, yes, we cherish each for their individual talents, but to be honest, in an emergency, only one of them is getting the PIN.
It's the middle child (speaking of wretched existences).
Actually, our Little Miss Responsibility doesn't even need a key card, she's already making real cash on her own by mounting elaborate roadside stalls and babysitting human infants.
Her older sister has a rabbit. It's her second, the first one, sort of a practice rabbit, died.
It's wonderful to be blessed with a responsible child but by having such a gift of domesticity, it becomes the responsibility of the parent to ensure their pint-sized control freak isn't punished for their own competence or pigeonholed into something that will arrest their development.
In years gone by, when families were big out of necessity, such a put-upon girl might have been lumped with the loaded nickname of Sissy ("blind one" in Latin) and developed some sort of Cinderella complex leading to a life of servitude and spinsterhood.
This sort of thing is played out in the natural world all the time.
Adolescent kookaburras, for example, are often press-ganged into helping raise their parents' next batch of chicks. Sometimes, however, older hatchlings will also kill their younger siblings, which may explain my nagging unease whenever our youngest, a simple, credulous boy, is left alone with his cunning sisters.
As parents, we grow into our roles, we become, as Supertramp says: logical, oh responsible, practical ... and over the years, our realm of responsibility, not unlike our waistlines, expands without us even being aware of it. What was once daunting is now a doddle; the kids get bigger, their problems get bigger and you just roll with it, until 8.47pm, when you pass out.
But being responsible for your own offspring is one thing, being responsible for someone else's is another.
I still have trouble relaxing when one of the kids has a friend over. Sometimes, multiples of the treacherous little informants.
My anxiety is most acute when my wife abandons me to be in charge, as she did last weekend, just minutes before I took receipt of a nine-year-old for a play date (with our son, not me).
"Don't give him any lollies," my wife warned as she and the girls decamped for the shops, "they make him sick".
As if I would ...
- B. R. Doherty is a regular columnist.