Who said the Steinbrenner kids weren’t going to be as much fun as their old man? The Evil Empire, through its GM (and future cat lady) Brian Cashman, sent an e-mail yesterday that said if Yankees’ Captain Derek Jeter could find a better offer than 3 years $45 million, he should Fucking Take It Somewhere Else. It was the kind of drunken hurt text message you send your favorite prostitute. OH YEAH? WELL YOURE JUST A FUCKIN PROSTITUTE AND IM A REAL PERSON! $45 million, by the way, is how much the Yankees spend annually on Puffs Plus. The good kind, with the lotion AND the Halls mentholyptus essence. Which is not to be used south of your equator, front or back, under any circumstances.

So why should you give a fuck whether Derek Jeter gets paid more than a gillion dollars to play baseball? Didn’t he give Jessica Alba herpes? Well, I don’t know, fuck it. I’m a diehard Red Sox fan. I’d practically suicide-bomb the new Yankee Stadium. I cheer for the Mets because sometimes I like to feel sad and alone. And this post-season I wore a Yankees cap around with the hopes that my terrible luck would rub off on the Bombers. Mission Accomplished. In less than a month they’ve been blown out of the playoffs by a former crackhead and his team full of lovable Antler and Claw hand-signalling Texas Rangers. And now the Yankees have taken the handsome face of their franchise and told him to start printing up his resume. When a baseball team doesn’t offer you salary arbitration it’s because they want to pay you way less. And they don’t fear you’ll go somewhere else. For a few million more than they paid Derek Jeter last year they could have had him back already, sans dramatics. So they must really want to put that fucker in his place.

The rule of baseball negotiations is that players shouldn’t take a pay cut to play for their old team. Now, Derek Jeter is pushing 37 and Short Stop is a young man’s domain. He pressed at the plate last year and only hit a respectable .270 on the last day of the season. Imagine if he’d hit .269? “.269!” They’d Say. But Derek Jeter has never been about the numbers. He is, in fact, a baseball numbers-bending enigma. No one has come up for the correct way to measure the intangibles he brings to playing for the Yankees. He always seems to get big hits, be in the middle of great plays and just be handsome and likable for no good reason most of the time. The only performance enhancing drug he’s on is his own awesomeness. And, um, maybe Valtrex?

The Yankees claim to be the organization that epitomizes class. Class in New York City is defined as not throwing up on people or keying their car more than once. And the death of George Steinbrenner brought all the Revisionist Historians out to create a sprawling narrative of just what a Champion Steinbrenner was. His only charm, naturally, was throwing Tons and Tons of money at Free Agents. And then hiring knock-around guys to get dirt on those free agents to use against them on the pack pages of the great New York tabloids. George Steinbrenner once blamed Jeter’s playboy lifestyle for a year in which the Yankees didn’t win the World Series. They did a credit card commercial about it with a conga line and all was forgiven. With Steinbrenner it wasn’t about Truth or Money or Being Classy. He was a gangster and it was about respect. And in baseball Respect is also Money. Money is also Money and your money is definitely their money.

But the old man liked to give complete jagoffs tons of his cash, because that was the Yankee formula. Crash your Camaro, Buy three More Camaros. In the meantime baseball progressed. Geeks and dorks left their Dungeons and Dragons behind to come up with wacky stats and suddenly teams that sucked won the World Series. Which was bullshit. The Yankees are always supposed to win the World Series, and the crushing expectations of being a Yankee usually destroy good players who otherwise might thrive. New York and Philadelphia and Boston fans understand this. You have a brief window to endear yourself or you will be TO BLAME. I still blame Calvin Schiraldi for the end of my first prison marriage.

Derek Jeter isn’t as much of a Baseball Player as a Unicorn. He’s like Superman or something, except when Superman gets too old to play Short Stop. But imagine the Justice League of America telling Superman he can join the Avengers if he doesn’t like the money they’re giving him? Superman has saved the Earth in every issue of every comic Superman has every been in for 1,000 years. Doesn’t the Earth owe him an Underpants Party by now?

Derek Jeter, if he gets to hang on with the Yankees, would be the first Yankee to accumulate 3,000 hits. Most hitters that get to 3,000 are mediocre, healthy guys. The Immortal Craig Biggio was the last one to do it. Druggie Rafael Palmeiro before him. It’s a nice milestone, the kind Jeter can reach because he’s not a home run hitter. But entire Wikipedia articles could be written about how Derek Jeter matters to the Yankees that apparently even the Yankees don’t care about anymore. Suffice to say, all Derek Jeter has done is be the best Yankee of the past 50 years. Stalwart and true. Universally praised and respected. The Yankees “have encouraged him to test the market” to find a fair price for his talents over the next few years. It’s like the old guy who always had dollar bills falling out of his pockets finally got a fucking wallet on a chain. Why have the Yankees closed the Bank? It would have behooved them to close it earlier. But to close the vault door on Derek Jeter?

Maybe they’ve got something on him the rest of us don’t know about. A secret half-dead skeleton baby that follows him around. A collection of hooker skulls. Who knows? Everyone is more fucked up than you imagine, especially the people who seem nice and normal. Haven’t you seen David Lynch’s movies? Maybe Jeter was a Papa Steinbrenner kind of guy and the sons are pissed off at him because Daddy Never Loved Them but he did love his Derekbear. Maybe he’s an insufferable prick. His move with the ladies is allegedly to send a friend over to them at the clubs and be like “You see Derek Jeter over there? He wants to party with you.” That doesn’t seem very prickish. He still calls Joe Torre, his old manager, “Mr. Torre.” The guy is a walking talking glass of fucking Ovaltine, people. He’s black, he’s white, he’s handsome (with the beginning of a little manjowl going on), he’s funny. He pretends to be hit by pitches that didn’t hit him. How could you not love Derek Jeter?

My brother and I have worked out a fair market price for Jeter. He and Mariano Rivera of the Yankees come play for the Red Sox, package deal, 2 years, $200 million. Blood would run in the street. Fans’ heads would fall off and broken glass would spill out. The Yankees Would be Destroyed for a Generation. Yankee Stadium would become the Poltergeist House. We have it all worked out. I mean, who wants to watch half-centaur Alex Rodriguez hit his 800th home run mark without Jeter around? Jeter is how Yankee fans imagine themselves. Debonair, manly, handsome, occasionally broken out with little red bumps. He is a goddamned walking God who should get blank checks and constant blowjobs from Yankee fans and management everywhere. But everyone there is spoiled, they’d rather fight about shekels. And now they’ve Embarrassed him Publicly in the way only Sports players can be embarrassed. They’ve taken away his Spermy Allure, a cultivated scent he has carefully crafted over the past two decades by keeping himself under wraps. Just hope he doesn’t sign somewhere else for a little more than what the Yankees offered. Then we’ll find out about those Skulls in his duffel bag in a hurry.

And this all occurred because Jeter’s agent said he was “baffled” by the Yankees Negotiation Strategy. Unless there is a bag of bones this is the Baffler of the Year. Inside a Giant Flying Stinkbug (I saw my first one last night BE AFRAID).

Image by Keith Allison, from Flickr.

Because I’m sure you care, I finally watched that Up movie and I didn’t really think it was all that. For starters, that kid was annoying as hell. And the grumpy old man shtick accompanied by heroic revelation was somewhat predictable. To be fair the opening ten minutes was pretty magical. And I too like talking dogs! But I dunno. At least I found it surprising, unlike the tedious plot of a Toy Story or similar. I can honestly say I did not know what was going to happen. And isn’t that the most for which one can hope?

“He is a f**king nuisance. I was seated next to him on a flight and the whole trip he just kept farting. It was totally foul. He kept saying, ‘Oh, that wasn’t me’ or ‘The meal smells a bit off, don’t you think?’ He drove me insane.”
 — Jamiroquoi frontman Jay Kay complains about Johnny Rotten’s antics during a flight the two shared to Australia. Rotten’s gas passing was apparently so severe that Kay was forced to retreat to economy class. [Via]

It was as if the basketball gods had decided to have mercy on me. Either that or my incessant whining was too grating for them to tolerate, while they were busy continually torturing the Knicks for treating Bernard King like garbage back in the 80s.

Thankfully, just as I was about to have that quiet conversation I’d been dreading — “Did I say Heat? I meant, cast of ‘Teen Mom’” — things began popping off in Miami. And I’m not referring to that angry Esquire writer (more on him later) popping off on Twitter. (Okay, here.) But also popping, like, ligaments and other body parts.

To being with, the injuries are mounting. You already know about Mike Miller going down for three, maybe four months. Now, very useful and cleverly named Udonis Haslem is out indefinitely, which is for sure a Code Red disaster for the team. Haslem is no All-Star, but at least he is, in NBA parlance, “serviceable.” And, while Dwyane Wade isn’t exactly out, per se, he always seems to be on his way to or from the trainer’s room.

Losing Wade, for however long, immediately transforms the Heat into a significantly crappier version of the James-era Cavaliers, which is an irony not lost on anyone who correctly uses the word.

At any point, had Pat Riley dropped the lotion and listened to the thousands of people who said, “Hey, when you guys play a team with a great point guard, isn’t going to be difficult and exhausting for your best player to have to chase them for 40 minutes a night?” the Heat would have a point guard, Wade would guard the two and LeBron the three. And, had he spent a little more time scouting for young, developmental players the bench wouldn’t be filled with folks who could be on an episode of “NBA: Dead or Alive?” Players like Juwan Howard, Jerry Stackhouse, Jamaal Magloire and, you know, “veterans” like Eddie House.

But Heat fans should relax because help is on the way. When the Heat’s team nuclear physicist finishes carbon dating Erick Dampier’s earwax to determine how old he actually is, he will become another cog in the wheel. A very slow, injury-prone wheel.

Meanwhile, a little further down the bench, boyish coach Eric Spoelstra is attempting to avoid being mounted by his boss. To anyone who listens — and let’s be honest, Spoelstra would have trouble attracting attention at a Burger King drive-thru — he is sounding like Greg Marmalard, urging calm over the din, claiming that he wants players with huge egos because that… will… help…them… win? (Yeah, I don’t get that either.)

There are some bright spots, however: LeBron has resigned himself to his lot in life (misery) and has played pretty lights out, despite his well-publicized exhaustion. And Chris Bosh has awakened with a pair of monster games — while the fans are still sending Twitter updates about being at the game, rather than watching it.

And best of all, somebody cared about Bosh enough to create a mildly clever, mocking video that rocketed around the interwebz like a cat attacking a baby.

Sure, he pussed about it, but that was only temporary.

The sad fact is that this video would be far better had it been made by people who could actually rap, or were attractive enough to look at for more than ten seconds. It has some funny lines and basically posits Bosh as a low-rent LeBron in the virulent hatred department.

But hell, I was happy because, as far as Heat coverage goes, the thing’s as culturally important as the Zapruder film. And so was the mother of all hissy fits from a writer: Cleveland native Scott Raab, who has been using Twitter and his esquire.com blog to Rochambeau LeBron on a regular basis. Gas dusters have less bitterness than Raab. I am not saying that like it’s a bad thing. Quite the contrary, Raab is at least truthful and honest in pointing out some of the same things that have gotten me to scratch my head. But he uses way too much profanity for the team to just sit back and do nothing.

After carefully studying the evidence team and opining that Mr. Raab was not to be trusted around its players, the team, no wait, the league, no wait, the team responded by banning him.

That was going to be where I left off, until last night, when I witnessed one of the worst displays of basketball I have ever seen, by players who have two working arms. The Heat played so terribly, that my League Pass involuntarily crashed several times during the third quarter. And here is the proof.

And that goes to show you how, the more things change the more they, in fact, stay the same. Or something to that effect. But listen: don’t get Scott Raab started.

Tony Gervino is a New York City-based editor and writer obsessed with honing his bio to make him sound quirky. He can also be found here.

Image via Keith Allison, from Flickr.

Since at least the 1980s, Evanston Township High School — the only (and extremely large) high school serving the suburb directly north of Chicago — has been both incredibly diverse and incredibly two-tracked. There was a lunch cafeteria for white people and a lunch cafeteria for black people — also, to its credit, an (at least somewhat) more integrated cafeteria for the freaks. That is where the smoking courtyard used to be, today’s young people may be astounded to hear! Likewise, in classes there’s a track for white people and some other non-black people and then a track for pretty much everyone else. Summer school classes, for instance? Nearly entirely black. Now, the school’s superintendent wants to try to cut this problem off at the root, by not sorting incoming ninth-graders into tracks via testing, and not having all-white honors English classes for freshman. Just like Cathie Black, I’m not an education professional, so I’m not qualified to comment on whether this is a solution or a maybe terrible idea! But something has to happen. For decades now, hundreds, probably thousands, of high schools just like this across the United States have actively tracked black students to not succeed, to not go to college and to not achieve success. Someone needs to shake it up somehow.

The most painful line of the day: “To most everyone, AOL was the company that mailed you all those CDs so you could get on a 56K modem when you were in grade school.” Most everyone! Grade school! OMG I’m going back to bed!

For those playing along at home, Gawker Media settled with Sarah Palin’s publisher, HarperCollins, last night. I would propose that the settlement consisted of Gawker saying “Yes, we already took the book excerpts down, don’t push it,” accompanied by a check made out to HarperCollins for zero dollars.

Well! People are saying that last night’s tiny Kanye West show was amazing, but when you listen to the clips of his ten-minute monologue, those are not really the sounds an audience makes when the preacher is on fire, or when something amazing is happening. (Although everyone does crack up when he thanks “the energy from the models.” Because that is hilarious. And there’s applause and enjoyment of it — just less and less as it goes on.) But mostly I think this is the sound an audience makes when someone has gone off the rails. (There’s whole parts that don’t make sense, after all! And anyone who spends ten minutes explaining “I don’t give a fuck what you think” is obviously not telling the truth.) Anyway, we’ll know more in about five hours when most attendees wake up!

by Mike Barthel

Something about the Palin family inspires conspiracy theories. The latest one is that Bristol Palin has only survived as a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars” because “Tea Partiers,” whatever that means (fiscal conservatives? Old people? Oolong fans?), have engineered a way to vote for her in some unnatural or unfair way, whether that be without watching the show or through automated voting mechanisms or, I dunno, planting suggestions in our dreams or something. It’s no mere Internet rumor, either — I heard it about it on my morning shows, and it’s become a major news story to the degree that both the show’s producers and Bristol herself have felt motivated to respond. But here’s the weird thing: “Operation Bristol,” as it’s been called, almost certainly does not exist.

You’re all skilled Googlers — try and find me evidence that this is an organized efforts. Sure, a few bulletin boards have threads where posters urge other posters to vote for Bristol, but none seem to have necessarily produced any sort of widespread, organized results, and none have provided links to automated methods that might allow a smaller number of people to artificially jimmy the vote. (Nor has anyone explained why Palin fans’ ability to do this wouldn’t be offset by, say, that of Brandy fans.) Though media commentators in what we’ll call an “older cohort” might not be aware of this, it is extremely hard to do things secretly on the Internet. The only way you can pull off something like this, as 4chan has discovered, is to make reading your site so incredibly unpleasant an experience that outsiders have no interest in monitoring your activities. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but it just doesn’t seem to me that such an effort really exists on any sort of level substantive enough to have a real effect on the voting for the most popular reality show currently airing.

Even weirder, most media stories haven’t questioned this. They actually seem eager to admit that there’s no real reason to suspect that voting fraud is actually occuring. Instead, they’ve used the “some people are saying” gimmick to lead with a question they already know the answer to which is “no.” They’re not doing so, as conservatives might suspect, because they hate the Palins (though not to say they don’t). It’s because we liberals just loooooove to read about them, and mostly skip over the part where the author admits it’s not true. We love conspiracy theories about the Palins! This is because we’re not actually any different from conservatives, duh. But it also reflects a somewhat substantial problem in the way the left views public life.

Don’t get me wrong here: as is the case with almost all Palin conspiracy rumors, the “operation Bristol” story isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility. (I won’t admit to you which one I totally believed for half a second, but I totally did.) Most notoriously, the Vote for the Worst project seemed to keep awful Sanjaya Malakar in the running for an inordinate amount of time during season six of American Idol. The Worsters said they did this out of a desire to “sabotage” the show and show it up for the phony piece of crap it is, etc. etc., so same kind of voting-as-cultural-criticism kind of deal. And reality shows have triggered political controversies in the past, too. There is a great book by Marwan Kraidy where you can find a few examples of this; my favorite is when a regional singing competition called “Superstar” sparked street protests in Lebanon after that country’s contestant was, the protesters felt, unfairly eliminated.

So stranger things have happened, sure! But this probably didn’t. The Worsters did their work entirely out in the open, and though we might like to think otherwise, America is not exactly the same hotbed of political action that the Persian Gulf (uh or wherever) tends to be. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s plausible.

Why then do liberals believe that it might still, somehow, be true? Why do we like hearing about this? Well, my friend Melissa Crosby (who is both very smart and unemployed, New York City media research companies!) did a study of the Worsters and came up with an answer: “negative fandom.” The theory here is that following someone or something you don’t like can give you the same sort of pleasures, and work in almost exactly the same sort of ways, as regular fandom. I’m sure you can all think of examples of this: Maureen Dowd, Glenn Beck, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” etc. (For me it was Barney, which let’s not get into.)

If we see our political beliefs as a kind of fandom — and we should, unless we’re clinging to some awful notion of politics as noble, in which case, gag me with a whistlestop tour — well then of course we want to hear about Sarah Palin’s family being involved in unsavory things in some nebulous and unlikely way. It doesn’t matter if the facts aren’t true, because what matters is the story. And the story is not a mere fiction! It is constrained by reality, and any false story that rings true nevertheless says something meaningful about the subject of the story or the worldview of the storytellers. It would be nice if the political press was more a conduit for facts of importance, but since it’s not, we might as well get some enjoyment out of it, right?

Admitting this would require us to also admit that the left really is as liable to these sorts of irrational behaviors as the right — we’re just inherently untrusting of different things. And that, in turn, might lead us to admit that maybe politics isn’t supposed to be rational. But that seems much too hopeful! So instead, let me suggest something else, something in which regard the left does seem different from the right.

The primary evidence people have offered for why “operation Bristol” has to exist is that Bristol is just so awful at dancing. This is not untrue, but it’s not necessarily relevant. It grants the dubious premise that the results of “Dancing With the Stars” are supposed to reflect some sort of objective assessment of dancing talent, unlike, I guess, every other reality show ever. It seems more likely (as some have argued) that DWTS’s primary audience — people like my Aunt Marg in Boston, who is a huge DWTS fan (hi Aunt Marg!) — really like Bristol’s story and would rather continue to hear that story than Brandy’s. Bristol is a young, reasonably likable girl who is struggling but mostly improving and seems, you know, interesting. The better dancers don’t have as much of an arc. It is, after all, a television show, not the Nobels; I have expressed similar feelings when it comes to “Top Model” contestants, for instance.

But Bristol’s awful dancing seems like damning evidence to liberals. This may not necessarily be a bad thing for us in this case — as a conversational partner has suggested, the idea that Tea Partiers (WTM, etc.) are so fanatical they would resort to rigging a pretend election is a damning one, and maybe really we’re arguing about electoral validity here, but I don’t think so. Instead, I think the left is insisting once again, in the face of all available evidence, that the meritocracy is real. Jimmy Carter’s campaign autobiography asked the musical question “Why Not the Best?” and as much as I love Jimmy, I think his presidency answered that question fairly effectively. While the left fixates on the visible aspects of best-ness like intelligence or achievement, effectiveness in politics is at least as likely to be determined by more nebulous qualities like personality, symbolic resonance and being a high-functioning megalomaniac.

Which is to say that politics not only is but has to be cultural rather than rational. We care about Bristol Palin’s success not because we think Sarah Palin’s daughter being on a reality show has anything to do with Palin’s ability to make multinational trade policy, but because we think these sort of cultural truths are politically meaningful. And we’re right! We’re just unwilling to admit that, and it’s become something of a weakness. The right accepted George W. Bush’s inability to actually accomplish any of their goals (for six years, anyway) because he kept signaling to his supporters that they were culturally correct, and the personal benefits they derived from that are maybe all we can reasonably hope to get from politics on a regular basis, or certainly from being fans of politics.

The left, meanwhile, is unhappy with Obama’s comparatively massive political effectiveness because we think he, being The Best, should be able to do whatever he wants, which we assumed (because he was so good at signaling it) that this would be whatever we wanted. Instead, Obama decided to be The Best by actually passing legislation and acting in principled ways rather than making his supporters feel good about themselves by engaging in symbolically powerful acts and shooting down the other side. He delivered partial victories rather than noble defeats. And we feel justified in hating him for it. Which is fine — it’s politics as culture, after all. But we want it both ways. We want The Best to also be the most psychologically satisfying leader. And that may not happen. If we really value results over our own feelings, then we should probably get over that and accept that our political leaders may not also be our intellectual leaders, or even our intellectual betters. They are just the masters of a very particular skill set.

I’m not unsympathetic to a cultural orientation to politics. I mean, it’s not like I’m making policy, so certainly it’s the only option I have. I just wish we were maybe a little more honest with ourselves about it. It took me years to admit that my political beliefs aren’t really more valid than the average asshole’s, and I still struggle with it. Political fandom wouldn’t really be fun if we didn’t, in some way, believe in the side we were rooting for. But that doesn’t mean our rooting always has to be rational. We can enjoy a crazy story about Sarah Palin’s daughter! We can say awful things about the other side! We can wave crazy signs that make no sense! And as long as it doesn’t hurt what we’re trying to accomplish, then great! America’s political discourse has always been a mire of invective, rumor and broadside. And that’s what makes politics fun. Let’s enjoy ourselves, for heaven’s sake. If Bristol got kicked off, after all, that would cut the story short. And nobody wants that.

Mike Barthel is a grad student with a Tumblr, so he gets some of his news from Regis and Kelly.

My parents, whom I love dearly, are hurtling into their respective dotages, and their house is getting weird right along with them. It’s not scary or sad or Hoarders-ey, so much as it’s something you may recognize from your own place, only with a few decades more stuff and a very adorable little dog in the mix. What’s at work here is a certain settling, I guess, that reflects an unspoken détente with all the piles of old paper and dusty shelved knicknackery. My parents’ non-aggression pact with those lifetimes of stuff makes for a tense border in nearly every room, and their coexistence with their things is not always peaceful — there are spasmodic organizing bouts from my mother, and the piles of dusty files periodically and unexpectedly yield to avalanche.

The collapse of one of those manila towers startled me awake when I was sleeping in the guest room a few months back. I was sleeping in the guest room because my room now belongs to bags of old clothes that my mother has been meaning to give away since Bill Clinton was president. Again, this is natural and totally reasonable, given that my parents are in their mid-sixties and have worked their asses off for their whole lives, but the sense I get when I come home now is that they’re just kind of leaving most of the place be, and that not a lot actually happens in the house these days. Thanksgiving has always been a big, busy day around the house, but it is now just about the only exception to the snowy, mostly happy restfulness that currently prevails.

It has always been like this, and I think the anticipation and days of preparatory work had much to do with why Thanksgiving always seemed so special and important to me as a kid, and why it has persisted as my favorite holiday. I vividly recall the way that the ingredients that jammed the refrigerator on Monday would half-miraculously evolve over the course of the week. Silver bricks of Philadelphia Cream Cheese shrank dazzlingly into my mother’s brilliant, dense cheesecake overnight — my mother’s cheesecake is the best I’ve ever had by a factor of a thousand, and that statement would also be true for you or anyone else, but I know better than to ask her to share that recipe. Disparate bags of vegetables reduced themselves to stuffing on Wednesday, then moved to the back of the fridge to make room for more ingredients before finally heading to the oven on Thursday. In the way that everything does when you’re a kid, it all seemed kind of mystifying and awesome. It still does, actually.

My parents have hosted every Thanksgiving that I can remember — there was probably a Thanksgiving or two at my unhappy grandmother’s unhappy Jersey City home, and I’ve definitely blocked it out — and take it very seriously, which means that there’s an elaborate choreography to the week’s work that is also taken very seriously. As I got older and was permitted to take a more active role in the cooking and serving, the magical transmogrification of, say, that bag of knobby, distended yams into a Pyrex dish of gooey sweet potatoes was demystified somewhat, but the whole thing never got any less sacred-seeming.

As with the rest of the house, the Thanksgiving routine remains untouched — as with the rest of the house, nothing is thrown out, everything is constant. My father tweaks his approach to those sweet potatoes (which will never match Aunt Harriet’s from when he was a kid, because how could they) and to the reliable horror that is giblet-chunk gravy, but that happens every year. The cheesecake, the cookies and other deserts, the stuffing and everything else emerge from their respective cookbooks every year. And those poor leprotic cookbooks’ are shedding pages in great chunks, the bindings are crumbling to dust, their covers bald and generally illegible. Still, they’ll be out this week as they’ve been out every week for 30-odd years. They’re not going anywhere, so why not.

Below is my thin contribution to all this house-clutter: a recipe I brought home from school when I was in second grade, and which my family has been making every year since. That we still have it is, as noted above, maybe not that notable given how many other things we have kept. To look at the recipe itself, though, you’d think it’s even older than it is — the blue mimeograph is hugely faded, the paper itself seemingly re-pulping into something as soft as an old dollar bill, a series of faint orange and brown stains now fully sunk into the sheet. I was pretty sure that Mrs. Irvine, the second grade teacher who gave the recipe to my class, was long passed. Second grade feels like a long time ago, after all, and seriously you have to see the paper this thing is printed on. Because I’m always and everywhere about the uplift, I’d originally thought of this as an opportunity to eulogize that second grade teacher — this mostly forgotten woman who had her second grade class doing square dances in the middle of the classroom, who handed out mimeo’d recipes and gave me a composition book and the instruction to use it as a special writing journal, because she sensed writing might be something I’d enjoy and because my spazzy energy needed an outlet that didn’t involve tear-assing around the classroom making fart noises with my hands.

But thinking about it now, I realize that there’s nothing to eulogize. For one thing, Mrs. Irvine is, as near as I can tell, alive and kicking — she even won an award from the National Women’s History Project in 2007, or someone who looks a lot like her did. And her recipe is still very good, and I’ll join my parents in making it sometime on Thursday morning. If we held onto the paper itself because we hold onto everything — out of inertia, out of habit, out of compulsion, out of something else — it bears mentioning that we keep making the cranberry orange relish because it’s really delicious. I’m constantly kind of amazed by how complicated my parents’ house has become — all the little nestled compromises and tenuousnesses and inexplicable deserts of left-aloneness, and that little, gleeful bathmat of a dog running around it all — but this recipe is simple, and so is understanding why we still make it. It works, and so it endures.

Miss Irvine’s Cranberry Orange Relish
(The wording below is my mother’s)

4 cups cranberries (1 pound)
2 navel oranges, quartered and unpeeled
1/2 cup sugar (Mrs. Irvine’s recipe uses more, but this is how we do it in the Roth family)

Wash cranberries and remove stems and other stuff.

Cut oranges and remove seeds, then put cranberries and seeded, quartered oranges in Cuisinart.

Mix well to desired crunchiness.

Add sugar.

Mix again to blend all ingredients.

Chill in refrigerator, covered with plastic wrap.

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!