Hump Day
By Brian Cormier
Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012
Moncton Times & Transcript
Editorial section

This week, I grabbed a bottle of salad dressing out of my pantry. I wanted to make a salad and thought my old stand-by dressing would do just fine.

Did I say ‘old’? Remember that adjective I used. ‘Old.’ Anyway, as I’m about to drizzle some of its oil-and-vinegary goodness on my salad, I decided to take a quick gander at the bestbefore date on the label.

I thought I’d had this bottle for awhile and wanted to make sure it was still good.

Now, I want to emphasize that I certainly don’t swear by best-before dates.

While there are some that are pretty much guaranteed to be accurate (milk, chicken, fish), others are way off, if you ask me.

Yes, salad dressing is one. And eggs, too.

I’ve had eggs weeks past their best-before date on the carton and they’re still perfectly good.

In fact, I’ve never had a storebought egg go bad on me.

Remember, this is January 2012.

So, I look at the label near the salad dressing bottle’s spout to check the best-before date. ‘April 25, 2008.’ I couldn’t help but laugh.

Obviously, I wasn’t that crazy about this particular kind of dressing because it had sat in my pantry for nearly five years, if you consider it was bought at some point in 2007.

April 2008 – George W. Bush was still President of the United States.

Michael Phelps hadn’t yet set medal records at the Beijing Olympics, which were still months away.

Lady Gaga who? Glee what?

Apple iPad? What the heck is that?

But my trusty bottle of salad dressing was around . . . yup . . . just waiting for me to finish it off.

Apparently, it would wait a long time.

I can just imagine the lonely nearly five years it spent in my house just waiting to fulfil its life mission – to be poured over lettuce.

It managed to do so a few times, but it was still two-thirds full by the time I put it out of its misery by pouring it down the sink.

The screams were horrible. Yup, pretty sure it screamed.

Hmmm . . . maybe I shouldn’t have taken that sip of it to see if it was bad before throwing it out.

The pretty colours and voices I heard in my head afterwards all made it worth it, though!

Not to mention the pink elephants and little green men who visited my house, too.

Yeah, I think I should have definitely thrown that bottle out a few years ago.

It expired in April 2008, which means I likely bought it about nine months before that.

Sheesh! It was like having pet that I had to put to sleep after five years.

‘Fluffy! I loved you so much! You went great with arugula and cherry tomatoes!’ In all seriousness, I was quasihorrified by my complete lack of care in this matter. I mean, it’s not unheard of to find expired stuff in your refrigerator or your pantry.

It happens to everyone. If it just expired recently, you do a smell test . . . maybe a small taste test . . . and if you don’t faint or start seeing dead people, it’s likely good to go.

But having something in your pantry that expired four years ago? Wow, that takes some serious negligence. I hope Martha Stewart never hears about this. She won’t just be a little upset, she’ll probably stab me.

And I won’t even tell you about the bottle of tea tree oil that I had in the house that expired in 2005.

Yeah, I just threw that out last week. I unscrewed the cap and I’m pretty sure I heard it gasp, ‘Please .. . just kill me. I’m so tired.’ Yikes! I just held its little head under water until the bubbles stopped.

To bottles of salad dressing, I’m Dr. Jack Kevorkian. I end up pouring out nearly every one of them. They come home with me to die. I’d like to tell you that it’s the first time I’ve thrown out a bottle of long-expired salad dressing, but I have to be honest and admit that I’ve thrown out bottles in the past so old that the writing on the label was in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

I don’t know why I do it. I’m always trying to find ‘the’ salad dressing. The one that will take me to Nirvana. The one that will cause me to stop and shudder uncontrollably in the supermarket with a lust so powerful that the nastiest pitbull in the world wouldn’t dare hump my leg because it may get more than it bargained for.

But I never find that ‘heavenly’ dressing. I always buy Italian.

French. Oil and vinegar. And there’s a blue cheese and bacon dressing that I like – but as a topping for hamburgers, not for salad. And then there are all those sweet raspberry dressings. I mean, you might as well just pour corn syrup over your salad and top it off with a cup of molasses and then sprinkle it with brown sugar. Ugh.

Overly sweet dressings turn me off.

Maybe I should just enjoy salads plain. But then again, I’m the guy who brings heads of lettuce home to die, too. So who am I kidding?

I’ve thrown out more brown and disintegrating heads of lettuce than you can shake a stick at. (How many would that be, exactly?) Even when I buy bagged lettuce or mixtures of other greens, a week later I find it in the back of the refrigerator looking like chicken gravy – brown, soupy and chunky.

If anyone from the World Lettuce Growers Association wants to report me to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for crimes against salad greens, be my guest. Just remember – you’ll have to wait your turn in line behind the North American Salad Dressing Federation.

Hump Day
By Brian Cormier
Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012
Moncton Times & Transcript
Editorial section

When my front doorbell rang in the middle of a snowstorm one night last week, I assumed there’d been in accident in front of my house or that something else was wrong. It definitely wasn’t proper weather for door-to-door canvassing for charity or churches.

When I opened the door, I found two teenage boys about 13 or 14 years old. They were both wearing skates. I live across from a city park with an outdoor skating rink that’s being maintained by a very nice neighbour for the winter. The rink has been a beehive of activity since the weather finally turned colder.

I’ve had my door knocked on before by someone in trouble – notably Andrew, a boy who fell and hurt himself badly in the park when playing with his friends a few summers ago. In fact, I wrote a column about it.

By the time I got outside to find out what was going on, Andrew was being cared for by my next-door neighbour who was pouring water over his hands to clean the dirt out of his wounds. After falling off his bicycle in the park, let’s just say that most of the skin on his hands stayed on the pavement and he was in quite a mess. I drove him to his grandmother’s house afterwards so they could take over from there.

Last week, however, I’m happy to report that my door was knocked on for a much happier reason.

‘Could we borrow a shovel to take the snow off the rink? We want to play hockey.’ The kids were polite and clean-cut. During the conversation, I noticed that one of them was clearly in the middle of the ‘voice change’ because his voice seemed to change octaves on every syllable he spoke. I could barely understand him because he was squeaking so much. Ah, the joys of puberty!

Now, when they asked me if they could borrow a shovel, I certainly didn’t hesitate in agreeing to it.

They asked nicely and were polite – and they promised to return the shovel when they were done.

I went out to the garage to get the shovel and passed it to them. They thanked me sincerely and took off excitedly across the street running on their skates (they were wearing blade guards) yelling, ‘We got a shovel! We got a shovel!’ Their friends made various exclamations of happiness and I watched them through the heavy snow as they hopped onto the rink to start the task of clearing it for their game.

I have to say, I felt all warm and fuzzy inside after that. I felt like I was in a Tim Hortons commercial.

In fact, I’m pretty sure I looked around for a film crew perhaps secretly recording the entire exchange. I smiled as I saw them eagerly clear the snow with the borrowed shovel. It was just so . . . so Canadian!

The only thing I didn’t do was put on a heavy hand-knitted wool sweater, get a big cup of coffee and hold it with two hands, stare out the frost-covered window and take a sip with big tears rolling down my sooky-baby face as I contemplated my Canadian identity. I’m telling you, the entire episode could have been a coffee commercial.

And if anyone from Tim Hortons reads this, feel free to steal the idea. Just make sure you add the squeaky-voiced kid, though! He’d be the Peter Brady-type comic foible in the ad. For those who don’t remember, there’s a classic 1972 Brady Bunch episode where middle son Peter’s voice changes as the kids are about to record a song for an album. ‘When it’s time to change, it’s time to rearrange!’ Back to my story. So, despite the kids being polite and tugging at the heartstrings by wanting to borrow a shovel to play hockey, I still somehow thought they might forget to return the shovel and it would buried in the snow until spring.

When I saw them leaving the park, I checked my back door and there it was – my trusty shovel right there where it belonged. The only thing missing was a hot cup of coffee sitting next to it.

I’m pretty sure I looked up at the moon right at that moment and saw the Canadian flag emblazoned on it.

A Canuck miracle during a snowstorm!

Actually, I believe that refusing assistance to kids who want to play hockey on an outdoor rink in Canada in the winter should be a Criminal Code of Canada violation.

What kind of heartless Canadian would ever say ‘No!’ to lending kids a shovel to play hockey in an outdoor rink. I mean, c’mon!

Have you ever seen the TV commercial where the boy asks the store clerk if he has any parttime jobs open? The gruff old clerk admonishes him for wanting to work when he’s so young. He suggests that he should be out playing hockey with his friends.

It’s then that the young boy replies sadly that he’s trying to make money so he can play hockey. In other words, he can’t afford to play.

Well, I’m telling you, you might as well just stab me in the forehead with a fork every time I see that. I get teary-eyed and start throwing money at the TV. ‘He can’t play hockey! What is this world coming to? Give him money to play hockey!’ Then I throw more money at the TV. Then I cry some more because a toonie broke my TV screen.

My illustrious nine-year minor hockey career wasn’t exactly a game-changer, so I’m not sure why I’m so sentimental about it. Must be part of my Canadian DNA. I got three goals in nine years – one of them on my own net. Maybe someone should have paid me to work in that store so that I could pay for that kid in the commercial to play hockey instead of me.

Hump Day
By Brian Cormier
Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012
Moncton Times & Transcript
Editorial section

I think it’s healthy to get angry sometimes. I don’t mean punch-ahole-in-the-wall angry or have-ananeurysm angry… but once every blue moon you just have to put your foot down and stop whining about things and do something about it.

The world doesn’t owe anyone a living. It doesn’t owe anyone riches.

It doesn’t owe anyone a chicken in every pot, as the old political cliché goes. It doesn’t owe anyone a sixpack of abs that could grate cheese.

(Tell me about it! I’ve tried to cash that cheque for years and no one wants to honour it!) Sometimes, it pays to get angry.

And it doesn’t have to be at someone else. Sometimes it can be at yourself. Perhaps you’ve been hurting yourself with alcohol, drugs, bad food or other habits. Perhaps 2012 is the year you get mad and fix it.

Perhaps you’ve put up with someone’s never-ending insults, lies and bullying. Whether long-term or short-term, perhaps it’s time to snap and tell them how you feel and make it clear in no uncertain terms that you’re not going to put up with that garbage anymore. Some of the best scenes in All in the Family – the classic sitcom – were when Edith flipped her lid at Archie. She had the patience of God, but when she got mad, people listened – especially Archie!

I know there are a couple of situations in my own life for which I’ve been showing patience that should by all rights give me a one-way ticket to the Pearly Gates when my time comes. But I’m also thinking that the patience I’ve been showing has run out. Now, it’s time to get angry. And when I get angry, watch out.

The main thing about getting angry is to do it intelligently.

Don’t embarrass yourself or make yourself look stupid. The main thing is to be determined and stealthy about it. You can still be very angry and smile while feeling the emotion.

If you weigh more than you want to, perhaps it’s time to get angry and do something about it.

Take that little devil sitting on your shoulder whispering sugar-coated sweet-nothings in your ear and put him through a paper shredder.

Besides, the salad-loving angel on your other shoulder is a better friend to you than you’ll ever know.

If a so-called friend is taking advantage of you emotionally, financially or socially, get angry and put an end to it. Remember, getting angry doesn’t mean getting violent or insane. Just make a decision.

Decide you deserve to be treated better. If someone is trying to ruin your reputation with lies, take them to task. Track them down and seek compensation for their untruths.

I’m sure we all know someone who’s as sweet as pie, doesn’t swear, is kind to everyone and who always puts others before themselves. But, once in awhile, someone goes too far with their words or actions and Mr.

or Miss Sweet-as-Pie blows a gasket. Those are the ones you have to look out for. It’s also a tell-tale sign that you’ve been a real jerk if you’re the one on the receiving end. There are lot of Edith Bunkers in the world – sweet people who are kind to everyone – but God help you if they turn on you.

I’m certainly no Edith Bunker.

I’m not that nice. But when she got angry, it made people turn their heads and take action to fix the problem. When Archie got angry, everyone just blinked and said, ‘Again?’ If you make anger a habit, no one will pay attention.

Yes, it’s true that sometimes anger is a healthy thing…

especially when someone is putting themselves or others in danger.

Is it OK for a parent to yell at a child who they find playing with matches? I would say yes. Is it OK for a spouse to yell at the other after discovering an infidelity? I think they deserve a good screaming-at, don’t you?

I don’t think it’s OK to beat the child, of course. I don’t think it’s OK to kill the spouse, of course. But an angry response to both incidents is certainly understandable.

The main thing about getting angry is to do it strategically. Do it sparingly. Do it when it’s warranted – and only when it’s warranted.

There’s no use freaking out at the littlest thing. Then, when there’s a real reason to get angry, no one will pay attention. The Edith Bunker strategy is the best option here.

Be kind and understanding 99.9 per cent of the time. Get angry when it counts and people will pay attention.

When my son was in high school, he had a big challenge with attendance. Although very intelligent, he was not one to go to school every day. He turned things around in university and became an excellent student and rarely, if ever, skipped class, but high school was another story.

Like most parents in a similar situation, I would yell and scream and get angry. In the end, he still didn’t go to school and I ended up hyperventilating with smoke coming out of my ears. Eventually, I read a book (‘Angry All the Time: An Emergency Guide to Anger Control’ by Ron Potter-Efron) that really helped, and just stopped getting angry about the school attendance issue. It was his decision and there was nothing I could do about it. He decided to change on his own terms and things got better from there.

Anger can be a pox on one’s soul if that’s how we deal with everything. The secret is to use it wisely, rarely and just enough to make your point. There’s no use leaving tornado-like destruction in your wake when a simple ‘evil eye’ will do.