The spat106 short longform #16

When to keep on going despite the odds

*This week’s newsletter has nothing to do with me persistently writing up a weekly newsletter despite hardly anybody reading it*

For a while in the previous week, National Party MP Todd Barclay resisted the calls for him to resign after it was revealed that he had secretly recorded one of his staffers. He carried on like nothing has happened. That is a bit like the Black Knight scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the Black Knight continually fails to recognise that he has lost the fight to King Arthur despite losing more and more limbs up until he is a stump. Then still not giving up even though that has occurred.

Todd Barclay did however recognise he was a stump and then said he would not be up for re-election later on in the year. It’s hard for someone with no limbs to campaign for an election, door knocking for one would obviously be hard unless he bangs his head on the door of the home he visits that he wishes he would get a vote from. Although banging your head on the door is the usual way of knocking on a door in the Clutha-Southland electorate that he is the soon to be former MP of.

So when are times other people have continued to go on despite everything signalling them to stop? The best instances are when you keep saying what you think is a fact but then someone discovers that what you have been saying all along is wrong but you have to own it and then frustrate them by persisting with the now newly discovered lie you have been propagating. An example of this was when Donald Trump wrote the word covfefe in his tweet and then both himself and his equally idiotic press secretary Sean Spicer acting like that word was deliberately put into the tweet. Despite that word not meaning anything and no explanation on what it means at all, Sean Spicer said that only Trump and an inner circle of his knew what covfefe meant. However in Donald Trump’s defence, the word covfefe made a lot more sense than what he normally writes in tweets and also says in his speeches.

Another thing were it looks like there should be some giving up but there isn’t is quite a personal one for me. And that’s when I order a steak or a some type of big meat dish but with that I order a side of either fries or bowl of potato mash along with it too. The mash or chips makes me full and makes eating the steak an ordeal for me a lot of the time. I’m not sure why I order the potato dish because I’m not trying to carb load, unless the work out is to be able to finish the steak without getting any type of meat sweats. I have ordered the meal now so I try to get through the dish despite everybody thinking I can’t get through it and it’s almost like completing the dish is to spite anyone who would doubt my dinner finishing abilities. Spite is always a good motivation to carry on with anything, I think that’s a quote that Churchill, Gandhi or Martin Luther King wish they came up with.

So yourself, the newsletter reader, through email or a week later on the website, how can you motivate yourself to carry on doing something where others want you to stop? In some other way then spite which I addressed earlier. What you need to do is just hear the words that Chumbawamba came up with in their song Tubthumping, which is “I get knocked but I get up again, ain’t nothing gonna keep me down.” That should do it. I however think the more appropriate song lyric is Come On Eileen. It’s pushing you as Eileen to do more, people think Eileen is of a lazy disposition so they say Come on, not expecting her to come on and but you say,” No, don’t patronise me!” and carry on regardless of their sarcasm. Come on Eileen is the motivational song that carries Dexy’s Midnight Runners to do a three hour concert of only Come on Eileen even though people are booing them after their second performance of the song. So if that works for them, it should work for you.