i have never heard the mother cussing in a very long time. and even if she did make use of words to express her extreme displeasure in something, it's mostly tame pussy cat words like 'stupid' and 'idiot'. when the mother gets pissed, her face just screws up into a bunch, sorta like a ginseng. and with that ginseng face, she contains her displeasure by swallowing it down into her system and thus rendering her the cool, calm and collected parent that she is. sometimes i wish i could tell her, 'Mommy, if you have anything you want to shout, please verbalize it. Don't keep it inside you, after you get breast cancer then you know ah!' but then 'breast' is not a pussy cat word. come to think of it, the only time when the family says out the word 'breast' is in church and that's in the hymns and bible (eg. Come seek respite upon my breast, child).

all that said, today is Grocery-Shopping Day for the Teo family. and i made the rare consent to accompany the parents on one of their trips to IMM. i've never liked going to that huge shopping mall where the main attraction is the Giant hypermarket and perhaps Daiso, a Japanese shopping outlet selling everything at the everyday price of only two dollars. you see, hypermarkets and two dollar shops are meant to attract the family crowds. everywhere you turn, you can't help but bump into children running amok in the corridors of the shopping center. in fact, you could throw a coin and chances would be that it would land on a kid eating an ice-cream. it would be quite cool if it landed IN the child's ice-cream. i hate children.

it used to be very tolerable as there was a Starbucks outlet there that one could chill at. most of the time, it was devoid of children. a laptop, a venti mocha Frappuchino, and perhaps an outdoor space for smoking and i would be at peace to type out another blog post before i finished my coffee. thank the heavens that the Guy up there came up with the concept of Starbucks. alas, the new IMM is devoid of any al fresco places with smoking areas. everything seems to be indoors, which can be quite irritating when the call of the Marlboro beckons.

the only reason why i decided to head out to IMM today was because i needed to get a new phone. the previous phone, a Sony Ericsson, had given up the ghost and the repair center was miles away in town. admittedly, it was laziness that motivated me to get a new phone. and a new phone did i purchase. i'm officially the proud owner of a Nokia N95 (insert Gary Oldman theme)! with 5 megapixels camera and Carl Zeiss lens some more! that basically translates into better pictures and hopefully a scandalous video worthy of xtube. those were the thoughts that run through my mind while i sat outside IMM savoring my cigarette and the N95.

it wasn't until i finished an indulgent second cigarette that my joy was shattered by a random stranger who suddenly sat too close to me for comfort. i looked up to see a young man decked in a blue polo tee and jeans and a cliche pair of Adidas sneakers. he was carrying a black bag that had a slit on the top and a lock at the side. that and a certificate of sorts accompanied with an identification card. before i could even say 'Yes?', he launched into a spiel about handicapped children and how they need money and impoverished families and how they needed even more money too. this is another reason why i avoid family-targeted shopping centers the same way one avoids a person with a severe case of halitosis. if there's one thing that i hate above kids, it's the donation people. because these days, the motivating factor for these donation people is everything but helping the impoverished. there are groups out there that pay young people to collect donations. it's even more sickening when you see the flag day kids toting their metal cans, soliciting monetary sums from the public in general. half their hearts are left at home with their Friendster accounts and PSPs that it defeats the purpose of flag day in the first place.

besides, the Community Chest takes ten dollars from my monthly salary. it's a hospital initiative to give back to the society and all that altruistic crap. having been in the nursing line for quite a while, i have realized that half the people that i try to help on a daily basis are not even keen to help themselves at all. yes, working in the hospital cheapens the whole concept of life and charity. i hand over ten dollars a month, which is way higher than what the average nurse in the hospital donates to the Community Chest (most of the nurses only donate a token sum of a dollar). of course, the donation guy who approached me never knew all that. so my rejection was taken with a great dose of scorn. not helping was the N95 with a retail value of $1095 that i was fiddling in my hands. as a side note, here's a word of advice for all the aspiring young people who are keen to make a career out of soliciting donations from the public. leave the smokers alone. i personally hate it when someone approaches me when i smoke. i hate it even more when someone approaches me for something when i smoke.

having chased the donation guy away with a firm 'no thanks, but thanks for asking', i finally met up with the parents when they finished with the groceries. and at this point, it would usually be my duty to push the cartload of purchases back to the car. which i did out of filial piety and mainly the fact that they are the ones paying for all the groceries. and here comes another reason to avoid the family shopping malls: parking space. IMM has six stories of parking and having avoided the place for nearly two years, it was to my surprise to see that they have expanded their parking premises with nearly a few more hundred lots. which is all fine and dandy for the car-owners but not that much for the gay son who's bad at psycho-motor coordination and trying to push a big and heavy shopping cart through the narrow aisles of the parking lot.

thank goodness for gym training because i meandered and weaved through the parking lots without as much a scratch or an injury. not on me, but rather the cars. alas, the mother who was driving on the way back didn't have such luck. while maneuvering out of the squeezy multi-storey carpark, the family suddenly heard a sickening crunch coming from the back of the car. at this point, the mother gave a loud and piercing shriek before she started saying (and these were the exact words) 'Stupid idiot bloody shit'. Ooooh... the mother is quite the human after all. inside, i was laughing. outside, i was still reading my N95 manual on how to synchronize the phone via USB cables. i was actually glad that the mother broke her composure, because it gave her a more humane side. i could relate to that given the amount of foul language i use on a daily basis.

apparently, a car behind had followed too close for comfort. and when the general traffic stopped to allow pedestrians in the parking lot to cross, the car behind us had just crossed a road hump. it didn't brake in time and that was when the crunch time set in. the father got out of the car and so did the owner of the car behind us. i had a feeling there was going to be a problem of communication, the father mainly being apt at the English language, but not Mandarin. the owner of the other car had a very bad case of protruding teeth (the kind whereby you close your mouth and it still sticks out), which did not make conversing with him any easier at all. i respected the father for his gutsy handling of the situation because the accident happened right smack in front of the entrance to the shopping mall. EVERYBODY was staring. mats stopped smoking midway just to gawk. the heartlander aunties put down their bags of groceries so that they could get a better view of things. every other car that passed us also slowed down to stare. we caused quite a traffic slowdown during that whole time.

it was thus, that a settlement had to be negotiated. halfway through however, the father popped his head in and asked, 'Jon, can you please help me take some pictures of the car?'. this i could do with some enthusiasm because i am admittedly, rather self-trained in the art of photo-shooting via camera phones. i was thinking of beautiful five mega-pixels photographs. unfortunately, the battery on my new N95 had run dry. well, a photographer works with whatever environment nature throws him. the father handed over his 2.0 mega-pixels Sony Erricsson and the gay son dressed in his gayest best of a singlet and short shorts headed to the back of the car. i couldn't help but think that now the traffic was slowing down because of an exposure of too much flesh on a gay man.

having watched one too many episodes of CSI and Dexter, i found myself 'processing' the scene of crime. but television dramas never did any justice to the art of forensics. because there i was standing with the camera phone, looking for the source of the sickening crunch we heard from the car. there was none. the rear bumper of the family car looked perfectly intact. it was as if the crunch was just a random sound effect that the Guy up there threw down to make the mother use a taboo word. i wished that were true, but the father pointed out to me a portion of the rear bumper. aaaah.... and there was the elusive indentation. very slight, very invisible, but one could see the faint outline of the other car's license plate if under the appropriate lighting. i start snapping away, all the while listening to the father and the protruding tooth guy negotiating a monetary sum as payment.

it was really a bad case of Mandarin and the father was kinda stumbling through a minefield of the right words to use to describe 'dent'. it wasn't until the wife of Protruding Teeth got out of the car to help the husband that the tables were turned. the wife spoke in Hokkien which was the father's main language of converse during his childhood days. and if there was anyone who could speak Hokkien better, it had to be the father. i mean, the father can even pray in very fluent Hokkien and end with the Hokkien version of Amen ('sim zeng sor wan', i have no idea what it means exactly other than Amen).

i managed to grab five shots of the other car's license plate which was rather difficult as the bumpers of both cars were in danger of caressing each other. the father had by then managed to convince a hundred-and-fifty dollars out of poor Protruding Teeth. i felt bad for him, but glad at the same for the father. contacts were exchanged, insurance agents notified, a meeting time arranged and both families carried on with their lives. back in the car, the parents discussed the situation while i was progressing onto 'How to transfer pictures from your phone to the computer'.

'The stupid idiot was sticking so close to the car, there was bound to be an accident! That stupid shit!'

i'm beginning to like my mom. and believe me, i seldom refer to the parents with the word 'my'.

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