hi all!
Recently, A took some days off his busy schedule to spent a bit more time with me, so we were out having dinner and taking slow walks. A few funny incidences occurred, but I would like to just put 2 of them down. This 2 I shall keep for my future enjoyment, should I read back what I wrote.
Incident 1:
A and I were walking along a stone path just yesterday in the evening. The night air was very cool after the rain and the foliage on both sides of us were very green, fresh and moist.
Yes, I can see Z leering liao…….how was it that I can actually notice the bloody foliage around me when I could be otherwise engage in other *ahem* activities that are immensely more enjoyable?
Because! We are not in the ulu BT hill nor Botanical gardens, we were walking thru this
damn tiny little landscape patch in Raffles place. I confess that I was exaggerating about 'dense' foliage, I was just trying hard to find lomantic scenery out of
nothing.
In fact, there wasn’t any bloody dense foliage to hide behind for some hand-held activity. There are only shrubs that reached my waist. On a better day, I could come up with some
waist-down activity, but it was rainy...and I'm
not a rain person.
There is, also, a traffic camera facing us from across the jammed streets full of horny horning cars and I already know i don't have exhibitionist tendencies...Hand-in-hand, we strolled till we came upon this one lonely
snail travelling across our path.
Digression:
When I was young, my mum often say I walk with a ‘chuay kim’ look, which means ‘looking for gold’ in Hokkien and slang for walking with head down, eyes on floor. Depends on how you see it, it can be both a bad or good habit.
As a bad habit, it contributed to a lot of headaches and black-eyes whenever I walk through a forest of streetlamps. I performed even worse at our HDB void deck- I called it the ‘
step step step-bok!’ walk. Yes, because the pillars were
bigger, but it didn't make them more visible, only harder to avoid.
There were a few times I walk right into a glass pane at a shopping center just because I was looking down thinking rather than up, where all the action is. Thankfully, I never broke them, said my mum, or she’ll have to pay the damages. I love my mum, I swear, but sometimes, she can be as frank and blunt as I am….which irritates me to no end. But then, when I walked right into the glass pane of Body Shop just last week, I was thinking much along the same line, despite nursing a bump about the size of a quail egg, much to the hilarity of the staff
('no, it's ok, miss, you only smudged the door, are you sure u ok? You worry about your head more, yes?).On the other hand, I’ve since earned about 30 + dollars in dropped coins and half-buried notes.
Although I dun chuay kim that much anymore (until last week, that is), occasionally I lapse back, especially when there’s some one to hold my hand in his….then there’s no need for 2 pairs of eyes to both see the
same road, rite?
Rite?!Ya
lor, I think so too, 1 to see where we’re
going and the other to
earn money and
spot manholes….Because the floor was wet, I was looking downwards because I’m also a
Saver of Snails…..aka
SOS....kekeke….(Barney would say I’m giving a bloody cold joke right now). But seriously hor, after a rain, all the snails will come out onto the path, so it’s really no joke, it's a real
situation.U know that snails have bad eyesight? Yes, I know they got their pair of itty-bitty ‘antennae’-like thingies with big protruding eyes that makes ppl think they've got some damn powerful goggles. But seriously, snails eyes can only differentiate light and dark. They use the two feelers to swivel around to touch leaf blades and thus move among the grass. Their bottoms, which is a long muscular foot, detect moisture of the grass and the soil, so from 2 points of measure, they navigate their way among the mini-jungle.
That’s why during the rain, just because their paths are still wet, they think it’s still soil…. so they just continue until they undulate right onto the wet stone path and won't actually realise it enough to turn back around.
Then like blind men who are asked to spin around 10 times and had their walking sticks taken, they’ll just walk a rough continuous straight line trying their best to detect landmarks with their feelers out stretched like hands.......
But since they don’t, they just slime straight, getting absolutely lost…
And it’s really better to be an SOS rather than walk with your head held high through a wet path between 2 grass patches. Of cos the long term reward if u were to quietly unhinge them with ur foot and lightly kick them back into the dirt would be that you’ve just saved some blind, frantically scrambling snail (albeit slowly and in a
moist kinda way)from being dried out when the sun comes up again. This would earn you some karma or brownie points with whatever religion you associated with.
On the other hand, I go for the
instant gratification. The one that comes from knowing that there’s no
crunching/ squelching/ mulching/ squishing or any form of cringing sound effects occurring underneath my very thin sole separating my bare naked wriggly toes from the Unfortunate Event.
Because it happened to me once, just when I chose to wear my new spanking flats with its extremely exposed toe bits… I’ve never been able to wear that pair without a shiver of goosebumps since then…
Oh yah, the crunching/squelching noise? It continues for a few more steps after the first contact…
It was an absolute conundrum. I couldn’t bear to continue walking and yet couldn’t bear to lift my feet to view the damage…I was also hopeless to run my sole across the grass to clean it off because I felt so guilty. I felt it was oozing right beneath my feet. The feeling was so grossly intense, I froze for 5 minutes just wondering what I should do….then I cleaned my feet 10 times that night.
Really, it’s not something u would love to experience….
Can u imagine stepping on this??!! 
So SOS hor! Get more Karma, save some lives! However insignificent! You have been sufficiently warned…Oh shit! Back to the show:
So we were just strolling (hur hur…) down the path when my habit turned out to be a good karma-tic one. If I didn’t stop him, he’d have trodden scrunchingly onto a big fat slimy snail in his way. By the size of that thing, A would have spent the next 3 nights scrubbing between his toes and cringing uncontrollably everytime he laces those shoes for the next 5 years.
The snail, although lost and all alone on the path, is obviously in the right orientation, because it was making a beeline straight for the grass on the other end and is ¾ towards reaching its goal. All things said, if I didn't help it, it would have gotten safely to the grasses in the next hour.
But being the extreme SOS nicety I am, I stopped and gently nudge the snail with my shod foot. I confess to being secretly
amused at their
suction prowess, because if u nudge too hard, you can actually
hear something R(A), although at the same time, u can separate the shells from their bodies.....
So how? well, you’ve got to do it really slowly and skilfully, gently prodding. Until you can tease and softly
separate the moist folds of flesh until they are open wide and the wet lips stop suc……
Er……*cough*....
*clears throat* Anyway, back to the story….
Eventually, I er…dislodged the snail and eased its terrified fully retracted body into the shrubs. Then happily, knowing there’s something good to report to the tih-kong when I expire, me and A both continued strolling.
After 2 minutes, A suddenly blurted out into the semi-gloom, his voice unnaturally loud until a cranky motorbike roared by, reminding us we are essentially still in Raffles.
