The Fast and the Failures

I'm going to hold off on the third part of my reflection because I realize that that is something I should be reflecting on towards the end of this week. For now, let’s talk about my failures. Rather, let’s talk about one big failure. An intentional one, I guess. To be clear, I’ve had many others, like the time my food wasn’t finished being cooked before dawn and I just kept right on eating until I was done, bathed in sunlight. Or the time I skipped suhoor for the second straight day (meaning consecutive days of 21 hours of fasting), and I had a little protein before iftar because I’d been working out and because GAINZ.

One of rap's foremost Muslims, brother Freeway. 
If you're of a certain age, when this come on in the club??
What?! I half expect them to play Society at Hilton this year.

I’ve faltered here and there, I accept and expected this. It’s not as easy as some veterans make it seem, and not as hard as some people who’d never try it assume it is. On the flipside (can’t say that word without thinking of the Roc’s reign over hip-hop mid-2000s, specifically them Philly boys), I’ve persevered on days I absolutely thought I would crack. I understand now that I have to go through these trials to determine how to push the boundaries of my discipline. There are challenging variables I didn’t plan for, that I couldn’t plan for, that have nothing to do with hunger and thirst. I’ll know to consider these things next year. I’ve gotten great guidance from Muslims who do this every year, but that advice can only go so far. They don’t know the intricacies of my daily routine. It’s within this routine that I have to mentally manage my way through little landmines of food and negativity.

But yea, let’s get back to my “intentional” failure. See, I like my massages. And I like to be massaged by females. Actually, the best massage I ever had was by a guy in Sri Lanka, and nothing beats those barbershop Indian head massages, but I prefer a woman for a full body experience. And I just recently found out that these are available in various hotels here. So I’ve been scheduling them for the past month. I scheduled one for this past weekend, not really thinking about the haram part (it’s always haram) and how it should count under “no sexual activity.” I mean, I kinda knew, but I didn’t really think about it. I mean, I thought about it, but not in that way. I mean, I did think about it in tha…ok, fine, I knew it was forbidden as all heck, I just wanted my dang massage, ok?! Look, I consider it medicine. There are no endings of happy sort. It’s for my poor muscles. But I can see how it’s not allowed, especially considering I had to wear these:

Supposed to cover your guy unmentionables.
Made of coffee filter material.

Now, I’m used to the little bits of fabric they give you to cover up in certain places. In NY and other places, you just go nude with a towel, but I’ve encountered the weird little underwear before. These were the weirdest.  I wanted to be like, “Excuse me, I don’t need a headband, thanks though.” So small that they could only cover half of…my back, if I wanted to cover all of my…front. And vice versa. So a choice had to be made. You can probably guess what I chose to cover ALL of. And by “ALL,” I mean “just enough to not get arrested for indecent exposure if I have even a fraction of an impure thought.” So yup, this was quite the haram experience for Ramadan. Gotta say though, it was my best massage here so far. Olga was very professional, friendly, and applied just the right pressure. If I was going to have my fast broken on this day by a haram massage, it was as close to worth it as I was going to get.