Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. Every wonder why mothers say that word three times in a row? It’s sort of mystical, or something.
    One stubborn won’t do, because he’s not only a little stubborn. To be a little stubborn is not to be stubborn at all. That’s just only unwittingly picky. That’s refusing to do something once in a lifetime, but then finding out you were wrong, and amending your smorgasbord of preferences.
    Stubborn-stubborn doesn’t cut it either: that’s only self-willed, able to think independently, which I’m certain is a crusade of the last thirty years or so. Stubborn-stubborn is just the embodiment of an ideal that is everyone’s enemy, according to the media and popular self-help regimes. “Don’t be a drone! Be a stubborn-stubborn! Think for yourself!” I’m not so sure what this will actually accomplish, because there have only been relatively few noteworthy bastions of stubborn-stubborn. Rosa Parks, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Michael Moore are all stubborn-stubborns in my book–although Rosa Parks is both a stubborn-stubborn and a stubborn-stubborn-stubborn, but the hard thing about that is how to consolidate her two titles into one: it’s not stubborn-times-five, because that would put her on the same plane as Michael Moore, who is a stubborn-stubborn and a stubborn-stubborn-stubborn-stubborn-stubborn. And he is not a stubborn-times-seven. Anyhow.
    Stubborn-stubborn-stubborn is planting your shoes into the wet concrete so you can step into them whenever you feel so inclined. It’s when a little girl won’t eat brussel sprouts only because they were ridiculed on a cartoon, and swears that they taste like dirt even though she’s never tried one. It’s when people do things just for the principle. Stubborn-stubborn-stubborn is the ultimate postmodern mindset: it does what it so pleases, thank you very much, because I want to, darn it. And sometimes there’s a lot more colorful language involved if it gets personal.
    And you thought they were just saying it because it made a nice little ditty.