Weird Wednesday: How I Became A Dallas Ambassador

There's a very good reason I never went into politics.  It's all because of this family curse.  See, generations ago, in Iceland, at a family reunion, one of my ancestors pissed off a local witch by refusing to coordinate the receiving crew for a rousing game of dodgerock.  She laid a curse on him and all of his descendants down to the seventh generation that went something like "May You Always Be In Charge."

Which is what happens.  It's very dangerous for me or other family members to join an organization because the odd are within six months we'll be President, or some other high ranking official.  Trust me on this. In one amazing year I watched my dad become President of the band parents association, the local flyers club, Kiwanis and the Society of Left-Handed Nordic Engineers Who Drive Tiny Trains.  (Okay, I made up that last one.  My dad isn't really left-handed.)  You'd think, being a woman, that I'd get out of this particular thing but guess what? Women ran the country back in 900s Iceland while the men took off and, you know, raided coastlines.

So I bought a condo; I got elected to the condo board as vice-pres. (I only escaped presidency because Joan threatened to divorce me.)  I joined OA; six months later I was running the Web site.  (As Seth Bullock of Deadwood: "I only said I'd be the building inspector because I didn't want to be the god-damned sheriff!") I got picked for jury duty; within minutes I was the foreperson.  (My name will be on that crummy verdict till the end of recorded time.)  I joined the church choir; suddenly I was in charge of altar flowers, chapel candles and something involving Sunday school.  Oh, wait, that's the other curse. The big-woman-with-large-breasts-and-a-clipboard syndrome that just sort of happens around churches. Beware, all ye well-endowed wenches who seek God. Whatever you do, do not let them hand you a clipboard. Not even if all they say is "Here, hold this for a sec."

Well. I've recently been placed in charge of something else.  This one is different, so pardon me if you have trouble taking me seriously.  I have been designated as a local ambassador for World Hijab Day on February 1, 2014.

What is World Hijab Day, you may ask, which is how I know you didn't click on the link. Geez, people, do you think I write HTML code to pass the time?  World Hijab Day is a day for non-hijabi Muslims and non-Muslim women who have never worn a hijab to try it out for one day.  See what it's like from the inside, as it were.  Why? Well, because especially in the Western world, there are all kinds of misconceptions about why women wear hijabs. A lot of people think that you only wear a hijab if your husband or father makes you. False: Most Muslim women decide for themselves how much to cover, often after talking about it with their husbands and sometimes religious leaders. You might also think a hijab is hot, uncomfortable and a symptom of women's oppression. False again. There are hijabs made of cotton and silk which are very cool and comfortable.  I'll admit I haven't worn a hijab outside for two hours in the middle of the Texas summer, but for the most part I don't even notice it's there. (And I'm never outside for that long in the middle of the Texas summer, but if I was, I'd point out that a hijab is pretty good sun protection.) And as for the women's oppression part, I don't believe that any woman should be telling any other woman what to wear. So if you're doing that, stop it.  Thank you.

So World Hijab Day is about promoting awareness, greater understanding and a peaceful world.  Which is pretty cool.  And--Oh. You don't even know what a hijab is.  (Uh, you could click on the link.)  Here is a pic of me wearing a hijab.  This is The Lavender One; I also picked up The Magenta One and The Grey One. (It was a good deal. Three for one.)  The Magenta One is my favorite but there are religious reasons not to wear a red or red-similar color in much of the Muslim world, so anyway, The Lavender One. I think I look kinda cute, or as cute as anybody looks in a selfie, anyway.  Joan looks very cute in hers, though it does have the unfortunate tendency to age-reverse her to about twelve.  (No pic of Joan. Sorry.  That is not happening in this lifetime.)

I'm waiting for somebody to point out that I'm not even Muslim.  (Thank you, guy in Ohio, for pointing that out.) True fact. I am, however, besotted with the Muslim world.  Pretty sure I've talked about this before, so I'll just say that in my opinion, Islamic women really know how to dress.  It's smart, it's practical and even if people are staring at you, you know they can't really see anything. And as someone who gets stared at -- a lot -- that's pretty nice. Someday I'll get up the nerve to post a pic of me in my Muslim swimsuit, which I bought for sun reasons.  If you want to imagine it, though, think of Jeannie's bottle draped in aqua with a hood.  Yeah, it really is that funny.  You can stop imagining it now.  Thank you.

So anyway, I found out about World Hijab Day and went to the web site and asked a question and suddenly I was the Dallas ambassador. This is just how these things happen to me. See above, re, family curse. I am now in charge of Coordinating An Event.  The first and only thing I thought of was inviting everyone to lunch at Afrah. Afrah was cool with it, so, making some phone calls and will pass around some flyers.  Saturday, February 1st at 1:00, Afrah Restaurant, 314 East Main Street, Richardson, Texas. Hopefully it will be warm and we can sit outside.

Somewhere, a 900-year-old Icelandic witch is laughing at me.  I just know it.

Buddhist Terror

I am so embarrassed.

Okay, maybe that's not the best reaction to a bunch of people getting killed in the name of religion.  But still.  I am so embarrassed.  My teeny tiny religion based on kindness, nonviolence, compassion for all beings and just in general being nice to everybody finally makes the cover of Time, and what's the headline?  "The Face Of Buddhist Terror."  Great.  This has to be the best thing to happen to the international Buddhist image since the sarin gas attack in Tokyo.

Not, by the way, that you're actually going to see this cover.  This is the international edition cover.  We in the United States got a cutesy cover of veterans painting a wall, which is of course the cover itself, with a dripping wet-paint headline about national service and how it might save the world.  I'd paste it in here, but one stolen cover image per post is probably plenty.  Still, international-edition readers get the real news.  We get some cleaned-up version that's meant not to disturb us too much, I guess, lest we all jump up in a group and demand that the corrupt bag of bastards running our country fucking do something instead of just sit there.  For real news, try some of these Web sites: Alternet, Huffington Post, Common Cause, RH Reality Check.  And for fake news, there's always Fox.

Back to Myanmar, though.  If you don't know where Myanmar is, it's in the Far East and it used to be Burma, east of Bangladesh and a little bit north of Laos.  If that doesn't help, it's near India someplace.  Anyway: For the last several months, gangs of Buddhists armed with machetes (Gangs of Buddhists.  That is just the most antithetical phrase.) have been going into Muslim areas, beating up Muslims, burning their houses down and in some cases killing them.  And if you're a Buddhist and your head isn't spinning around at this piece of news, what kind of a Buddhist are you?

Obviously this is completely out of character for Buddhists anywhere, even Myanmar.  It's not Right Thinking and it certainly isn't Right Action.  It violates the First Precept and the Second Precept (I'd argue that burning somebody's house down is the same as stealing; you've certainly taken from them their use of that house, and anything in it).  Why on God's green earth would Buddhists behave this way?  Well, apparently because of the guy on the cover, Wirathu, who calls himself the Buddhist Bin Laden.  (Yes, he said that.  He said that.)  Wirathu says that the Buddhists are only defending themselves from Muslim corruption.  The Muslims come into an area, he claims, and they marry all the Buddhist daughters, spread their religion and take over.  Myanmar needs to remain Buddhist by any means necessary, and apparently the means necessary (as determined by him) is, uh, anything goes.

I'm blown away that so many people are listening to this guy and are willing to go along with what he says.  Rather than listen to the values they've lived by all these years, they'd rather listen to somebody who validates their fears and tells them to do what they want to do anyway.  I guess that's no different than people listening to Christian megapreachers on late night TV, going in to work the next morning and firing the gay guy who works in the mail room, but I just thought Buddhists were above this stuff.  Part of being human is being endlessly disappointed in your fellow humans.  Or, as my receptionist keeps telling me, "People are strange. People are strange. People are strange."

This is killing me, personally, because I love Muslims.  I am fascinated by Islam, though always from the outside because they'd never take me. (The whole lesbian thing, you know.)  I love their art, I love their music, I love their culture, and I love their food.  I love to go to Afrah on a Thursday night and hear Arabic spoken.  If Muslims and Buddhists become enemies again, they might not let me back in, and sales of pita bread in Richardson would plummet and create a miniature black hole that would spread and suck down the entire U.S. economy.  I mean it could be chaos.

Unfortunately, Muslims and Buddhists have a history with each other.  From the 9th century battles with Sunni Turks  to the destruction of the Buddhas at Bimayan in 2001, a lot of blood has been spilled, even if it had less to do with religion and more to do with living space.  And usually, the Buddhists came out on the losing side of these conflicts.  One thing about Muslims, historically speaking:  You don't want to piss them off.

Anyway, Myanmar isn't the only country to experience this kind of conflict.  Buddhist/Muslim riots have been reported in Indonesia, southern Thailand and Sri Lanka just in the last year.  The Dalai Lama has condemned the violence. Thich Nhat Hanh sounded off in Tricycle Magazine with a list of co-authors that read like a Buddhist Who's Who.  And both of them said what I suspected all along: This isn't about religion.  This is about two groups of people who are deciding not to get along, and using religion as a handy excuse to fight with each other.

Well.

I just want you all to know that there are 448 million Buddhists in the world, and most of us are NOT LIKE THAT.  Oh, sure, we get pissed off.  Myself I get angry about injustice and rape and lack of ethics in government and men trying to control women's bodies and bad drivers and $7,000 sewer pipes and bad faxes from opposing counsel and workplace pettiness and large companies that are "too big to fail" so they get away with anything and cats howling in the middle of the night and waking me up and people who won't look at the big picture and my idiot neighbor (who is an idiot) and so-called Christians who picket soldiers' funerals and the people who work on the 12th floor of my building who dress like it's Saturday and they're going to spend the day shooting up.  But I've never taken a machete to any of them and I never will.  When I took refuge and accepted the Five Precepts it meant something.  A religion is not a cafeteria, people.  If you're going to live by a set of values, live by them.  Full time.  Not only when it's easy but especially when it's hard.

Writing In The Dark

You know, sometimes I get tired of writing these.  I mean, I know my legion of screaming fans - both of you - would commit violent gory suicide with chainsaws and the business ends of automotive engines if I ever stopped, but there are days when I ask myself what the frick'n point is, anyway.  This is a dangerous question for a Buddhist to ask about anything because, of course, there is no point.  To anything. Ever.  And once you start thinking about that, it's only a short period of time until a miniature black hole takes root in your brain and your entire head starts to slowly implode, kind of like the planet Vulcan did in the first Star Trek movie but without the great f/x.  And we all know how that ended.

(Okay, I admit I have no idea how that ended.  That movie confused the living sheep out of me.  Was Leonard Nimoy supposed to be the "old" Spock from our timeline, and Zachary Quinto was the "new" Spock because he hadn't passed through the space/time paradox, or what the hell was going on, on that ice planet?  I kept expecting a guy in a blue box to materialize and explain the whole thing in a British accent, and then somebody named Luke to get into a fight with an abominable snowman.  No, don't tell me anything about the new Star Trek yet.  I haven't seen it. Hopefully this weekend.)

The irony is that I always have time for it.  Thursday, six o'clock, me, laptop, Afrah.  In between gobbling pita bread and guzzling lemonade (except during Ramadan, and July 8 through August 7, thanks for asking), I knock out sentences like I do it for a living.  Which I do, kind of.  Most of them start out like "COMES NOW GUS GOODGUY, Plaintiff, and complains of WILL WEASEL, Defendant, and for this his Original Petition will state as follows..."  I also write in the morning before work.  Two to three pages of whatever junk is knocking around in my head, and it's generally a lot of paranoid delusional self pitying sissypants crap.  What I don't seem to have time for, and this is really weird considering who's saying it, is actual, you know, writing.

I am working on a novel, you know.  (Or maybe you didn't.  Okay, I'm working on a novel. Now you know.)  I'm only about 30 pages in, but that's 30 pages that didn't exist before.  What's ironic, though, is that totally unlike Mindbender and her two older sisters, this one is, uh, actually hard.  As in, it's not just flowing out of my fingers like so much, uh--what flows out of fingers?  I guess nothing, unless you chop off the ends.  So let's just drop that simile like a lead balloon and move on.  What I mean is it doesn't soar.  It just plods along, and I sometimes feel like I'm breaking rocks on the freeway just to knock out the requisite ten pages for the next meeting of my writer's group.  (Did I mention I'm in a new writer's group?  I'm in a new writer's group. Now you know.)

I avoid working on it.  I tweet.  I flip through Alternet and Huffington Post and RawStory and RHRealityCheck and lots of other Web sites filled with great stories about this great country and the great people in it, and how the rich are greatly helpful to the poor and the poor have a great chance of becoming rich, and everybody respects everybody else's civil rights and it's all just great. Then I mess with my cell phone, play a few rounds of Words With Total Strangers, say a few things on Disqus that I'm bound to regret in the morning and move the word "plant" up and down and all over the screen for no apparent reason.  Maybe I get a sentence or two in there.  I'm likely to erase the sentence ten minutes after I typed it and start over again.

Is it writer's block?  No.  I don't believe in writer's block, and I didn't believe in it when I was unmedicated and writing in 18-hour overnight binges of 70 pages at a stretch.  Man, I miss those days sometimes.  (Joan doesn't, though.)

What I think it is, is the Curse of the Dryer Lint.

See, Mindbender is a very dark trilogy.  There's a dangerous assassin and an international criminal and a psychotic would-be general and a petrified accountant and a lot of other Really Bad People in it.  Some of these Bad People do Very Bad Things.  Some of the Good People, for that matter, get pushed into situations where they, too, have to do Very Bad Things.  (The insane mother, for example, jumps the corrupt detective in a hospital corridor and kills him by injecting drain cleaner into his carotid artery.  He expires in less than seven seconds. I was particularly proud of that one.)  And maybe because there was all this darkness tumbling around in my head like clothes in a dryer, I started to build up dryer lint that could only be cleaned off the screen if I wrote something completely ridiculous.

So I did.  And it was fun.

And I'm trying to do it again, here, and it's not fun at all.  The only thing I can see I'm doing different now is not writing something very dark at the same time.

So maybe I need to start something dark.  Or go back to something dark that I was working on but quit working on because it was too dark.

Which reminds me, I have a meeting to get to.  I can tell because it's getting dark.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Let it never be said that Buddhists don't get mad.  We tend to be more even-tempered than your average bear, and we don't get mad often, to be sure.  When we do get mad, though, it's usually because we see some being giving some other being, who doesn't really deserve it, a hard time. At least, that's when I get mad.  And when somebody's giving an entire group of people a hard time, regardless of what group of people, I tend to hit the fucking ceiling.

Before I go any further, though, I'd like to offer a general apology to Muslim women.  Not just the one or two of you who might have been in the Baylor Tom Landry Fitness Center dressing room this morning at about 7 a.m. local time.  No, I think this one should go out to all .8 billion of you.  I had a chance to stand up for you today and I didn't take it because I am a fucking coward.  I'm sorry.  I hope I really mean it when I tell you it won't happen again, because the things I regret in my life are by and large the things I haven't done.  The jobs I didn't take and the adventures I didn't go on and the confrontations that I avoided because I was scared.  I have a way with words, ya know, and when I waste a chance to make them count I just seethe inside.

So, okay. Tom Landry Fitness Center, 7 A.M.  Look, I know the Concerned Women of America work out there.  How can they not? It's a nice, tony place. Sort of a country club without golf.  I'm just a low-rent swim team member who gets to use the place for an hour or so in the morning. And I hear these conversations that make me shake my head in amazement and sometimes want to pound it against the wall.  Most of the time I can ignore them, though.  I mean, people don't like total strangers walking into their conversations to correct the facts of something they picked up from Fox News.  And it's none of my business, anyway. I've got much better things to do than save people from their own stupidity, especially when I know they won't even be a smidgen grateful.

But this.  This was beyond the pale.  This was two ladies talking about the Book of Revelation and how it was all "coming true."  How it said in the Bible that in the end times, our President would be a Muslim.  That the Muslims claimed to have a peaceful religion, but in reality they wanted to take over the world and force everybody to be a Muslim.  That they wanted to institute global jihad because they believed their messiah would only come back to a state of chaos.  That even if only 1% of Muslims believed this way, there were so many of them that the world was in serious danger.  It said so in the Bible. "It's really scary," one of them said to the other.  Yeah.  Bullshit is scary.  At least until you REALIZE IT'S BULLSHIT.

I have an exercise I do when I hear what appears to be hate speech.  I change the group of people being mentioned to another group of people and see how it sounds.  If it sounds unbelievably racist to say, for example, that the Jews claim to have a peaceful religion but in reality they want to take over the world and force everybody to be Jewish, or that the blacks want to institute global jihad so the black messiah will return, then it's hate speech.  This was definitely hate speech.  I'm fortunate not to remember all of it because I think I'd start foaming at the mouth.

Anyway, I struggled out of my clothes, tried to get my stuff together, while half my brain ran to the end of its chain and barked and the other half of my brain held onto the chain and kept repeating, "Do not go over there.  Do not involve yourself in that conversation."  I thought of the time some bitch was going on and on about Obama and I'd burst into song to shut her up. I was too angry to do that; I'd have had to sing something by AC/DC or Stiff Little Fingers instead of Beethoven, and AC/DC and Stiff Little Fingers are not popular among the Concerned Women for America set. The only thing I could really do was get my earplugs in as fast as possible and get out of the dressing room as fast as possible, so I could get into the pool as fast as possible and swim as fast as possible so that I could cool the hell down as fast as possible.  Which took about 45 minutes, in case you're wondering.

I'm not gonna bother to refute most of those statements, but the President-as-Muslim one is just too ridiculous to let lie.  The Bible, or rather the Book of Revelation, was written a good 70 or 80 years after the death of its supposed author, John the Baptist.  It reads like a good acid trip and was probably brought on by poisonous mushrooms.  I'm supposed to believe that this book references the President - of a form of government that does not yet exist - of the United States - of a country that does not yet exist, on land that is not yet known to exist, across an ocean that is not yet known to exist - and states that he will be a Muslim, a religion that does not yet exist (around the year 600, people, in case you're wondering)?  Even for me, who once believed that she could be recalled like a defective automobile and stripped for spare parts, that's a bit of a stretch. Yet the Concerned Women for America are all over it.  Have they actually read the Book of Revelation?  Or anything else in the Bible?  Or do they just take Cal Thomas's word for it?  I mean, seriously.  Is there any thought process that goes into this stuff whatsoever?

Here's the part that really frosts me.  I took off out of that dressing room because I didn't think there was any way I could say anything without totally blowing my stack.  Once I'd calmed down a little, I realized I could have shut the whole thing down without even raising my voice.  All I would have had to do is walk over there, put my hands down on the counter and say, in a soft voice, "Ladies, there are Muslim women in this dressing room right now.  Go ahead and talk smack about them if you want to, but please keep your voices down."  That's it.  That's all that needed to be said.  It wouldn't have been rude, I wouldn't have come across as a bitch, I just would have made them aware that their conversation was being overheard.  That probably would have stopped it entirely and if there were Muslim women in the room (and the odds are in my favor there; lots of nurses and nurse's aides use the fitness center, and lots of those nurses and nurse's aides are from Someplace Else, and lots of those Someplace Elses are Muslim countries), somebody would have spoken up for them.

Believe me, there are plenty of times I wish somebody had spoken up for me.  The times I've overheard conversations about "the gays" this and that, or "the crazy people" this and that, or better still, "so and so did (insert bizarre behavior here), he must be bipolar."  And there I stand, invisibly lesbian, more invisibly bipolar, thinking to myself, "I'm nothing like that.  We're nothing like that.  Where is he getting that?" and not having the guts to speak up.  It happens less and less often these days, since I'm getting older and my tolerance for bullshit is dropping, but there's always a sense of threat there, a fear that if you out yourself as a member of the group being discussed, all that negative attention will turn on you.  If you're lucky, they'll just yell at you and call you names.  If you're not lucky, they might beat you up or kill you.

That's why we need to speak up for each other.

I'm sorry I didn't do that today.

Talk Thursday: Convention

As I crash the Muslim restaurant of my sweet dreams, I'm pondering the whole concept of convention.  Why?  Because it was my idea, that's why, and also because everybody I follow on Twitter is absolutely refusing to shut up about the hurricane that's going on down in Tampa.  No, the one in Tampa, not the one in New Orleans.  You know, the one where whoever's keynote speaking can't go more than two minutes without saying something stupid that offends half of America.  Or the other half.  Sometimes both halves.  I'm trying not to pay it too much attention.  I may just have to sign off Twitter for the duration.  And I'm not sure what I'm gonna do when that other convention fires up.  Different keynote speakers, same two-minute habit, except they generally don't offend me personally.  The last few days I've felt like scaling Fountain Plaza and yelling, "Can't we all just get along?" as the helicopter buzzes by to film the opening sequence to Dallas.  

Apparently we can't.  Apparently it's been the fate of personkind to be divided into two factions that fight over everything since we were cave men (and women).  The only thing that's ever united the two feuding factions is the presence of a bigger, badder enemy.  So, unless there's an alien invasion (we can always hope), we're stuck with our two sets of clowns until November.  Which, despite all appearances to the contrary, slowly approacheth.  

(A guy I know on Twitter is trekking all over Europe.  When he was in Scotland last week, a Scotsman came up to him and asked if he was American.  When he acknowledged that he was, the Scotsman asked, "Are the lot of you fucked in the head?"  The sad thing is, I don't know if he was talking about Todd Akin or our latest mass shooting.  Latest.  Mass.  Shooting.  Think about that for a second.  I mean, that's like saying World War Two to a space alien.  "Wait a minute.  You had a world war and you did it more than once?!"  How embarrassing.  Please, if any of you ever have a close encounter of the third kind, try to keep off the subject of recent American history.  It's best if you just explain about Steven Spielberg and go from there.)

Meanwhile, I've been having a tantrum.  Tantrum, midlife crisis, whatever you want to call it.  I saw one of my docs today, and he summed it up pretty well by saying, "I imagine it's pretty hard to be you."  Well, uh, it is.  Thank you for noticing.  I have, as they say, A Lot On My Plate.  The latest thing that I feel absolutely outraged at not having under my firm control is the fact that I have nothing under my firm control.  That is, I'm forty-three years old, I have a house, car, cats, wife, responsible job and all the other trappings of adulthood (even my very own credit card debt!), and yet I can't take care of myself like an independent human being.  

I can hear all of the Buddhists laughing out there.  There is, of course, no such thing as an independent human being.  All of us rely on each other.  Don't think so?  Well, take a look at this laptop, here.  The one I'm typing on.  I didn't build it.  Yeah, regardless of what Obama said or didn't say.  It's true.  I did not build this laptop, yet it is essential to my well-being in ways that only become screamingly obvious when you take it away from me.  And I do mean screamingly obvious.  I didn't make my clothes, my mala bracelet, my car or even this unbelievably delicious fried kibbe and akawi pie that I'm snarfing down between sentences.  Other people did all that.  I need them, and they need me.  You can't navigate a lawsuit without a paralegal.  (Well, I suppose you can, but you wouldn't want to.)  You can't run a law firm without the guys that make the copy paper and the pens and the cute little laminated tabley things that pass as desks anymore.  You can't make copy paper without trees, and you can't make trees without dirt and sunlight and a lot of time.  So, technically, I am a product of sunlight and dirt and time.  And I can't take care of myself.  That's obvious.  So what, then, is the Big Deal?  

Well, the Big Deal is that besides the dirt and the sunlight, I seem to need a team of advance-degreed professionals.  Sometimes I end up in their offices, like I did today, and they say stuff like, "I imagine it's pretty hard to be you," and send me into a tailspin.  I called up Joan and ranted and complained and wanted to know why, after all this time, I still couldn't take care of myself.  And she said, "Jen, you are taking care of yourself.  You're going to see your doctors when you're supposed to.  You're taking your meds when you're supposed to and you're doing everything you're supposed to do."  She's right.  I've even been off sugar for (gulp) seven days now.  The New Guy has inspired me to new heights of--of high things.  "But I don't want to have some committee following me around for the rest of my life," I said.  "I want to be able to stand on my own two feet."  "You do stand on your own two feet," she said, "and those two feet take you where you need to go, when you need to go there."  (Well, she said something like that.  I have a good ear for dialogue, but it's not perfect.)  

Big sigh.  Minor grumbling.  Settling down, wiping the foam off my face.  Okay, okay.  I may not be able to exist as an independent human being, since no one really can, anyway.  But that doesn't mean I have to like it.  And I don't, just for the record.  It'd be interesting, though, if we could get everybody in the same place at the same time and just hear what all of them have to say.  The New Guy and Dr. Patel and Dr. Simon and Dr. King and Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and what's-his-name from China.  Throw in Avalokishvara for some variety and maybe a little Vishnu.  Good heavens, it's starting to sound like--a convention.  Nobody call Fox News.    

Books O'the Decade: God's War and Infidel

The nations of Nasheen and Chenja have been at war for so long that nobody remembers exactly when it started, or exactly why.  For several hundred years, Nasheenians and Chenjans have been sending their young men to die at the front.   Sometimes the young men turn tail and run, and when they do, they're often carrying dangerous infections back to a population that hasn't been vaccinated against the latest in germ warfare.  Which is where the bel dames come in.  These ladies are highly-trained, government-sponsored assassins that hunt down the deserters and kill them before they can kill anyone else.  And sometimes they kill other people, too, for reasons known only to them.  

Nyx used to be a bel dame, until a little side work with genetic engineering got her thrown in jail.  Now she's a run-of-the-mill bounty hunter, settling old scores and solving other people's problems by severing heads.  When the Queen Herself calls on Nyx to collect a head, Nyx's hopes of getting her bel dame license back become more than a pipe dream.

Of course there are complications.  There are other interested parties--including other bel dames and Nyx's former boss, who lost a rather important body part to Nyx after a certain "misunderstanding."  There's the Chenjan magician Rhys, who just joined Nyx's team, and for whom she has feelings she doesn't understand.  And then there's the matter of the bounty, herself--a scientist from another world whose knowledge may hold the key to ending the war.

Or the human race.

Six years after the events in God's War, Infidel opens with a schism in the bel dame counsel.  Nyx is recruited--this time by some of the bel dames--to find the leader of the opposing faction and end the split before civil war breaks out in Nasheen.  The search takes Nyx into the neighboring country of Tirhan, where Rhys has retired, married and had two children.  And I can't say another word about this one without tripping over a spoiler or two, but let's just say it involves a new superweapon, some boxing, and one woman's ability to turn into a tree.  And no, I'm not gonna explain that.

Now, y'all know I'm endlessly curious about Muslims, have some Muslim friends,would probably convert if they would have me and make up for it by hanging out at a great Muslim restaurant instead (and leaving very nice tips).  Well, these books are an absolute treat, because Nyx's world is populated entirely by Muslims, descendants of the First Families that came down from the moons three thousand years ago.  Ever wonder what Islam--or any religion, for that matter--will look like in the far future?  This is a peek.  It's bound to get your brain turning, and even if you only know a little bit about Islam, you'll feel the pieces fall into place as you read.  But that's hardly the only reason to buy this series.  It's the best kind of sci-fi; the kind that doesn't waste a lot of layers explaining How Stuff Works and just gets to the frick'n story, already.  And what stories they are.

Ms. Hurley's third and final novel in the series, Rapture, will be published in November.  You'll want to read both God's War and Infidel before then. Yes, you will.  Trust me. Oh, and if you wanna follow Ms. Hurley around on Twitter, she's @KameronHurley.

Talk Thursday: Way Safe?

Well, kids, Ramadan has started. I know I should not complain; I don't have to fast between sunup and sundown every day for a month. But I do have to abstain from the World's Greatest Pita Bread for thirty days, which is plenty bad enough when you're as hooked on it as I am. That is, unless I can talk someone into coming with me to the nightly Iftar bash at Afrah. Afrah closes after lunch and then reopens at sunset, where they put on an Iftar spread that's supposed to rival the palace of the Sultan Himself. I've always wanted to go, but I've hung back for two reasons: 1. I haven't been fasting all day, so I'm not sure I could do it justice, and 2. It's kind of not my party. I mean, I'm deeply indebted to the Muslim community of Richardson for letting me hang around on the periphery, listen to their Arabic and their wild pop music, and eat their unbelievably wonderful food, but I kind of think crashing their party would be pushing it. It wouldn't be, you know, safe.

I don't mean safe in the physical-danger sort of way; Afrah is about the safest place you could possibly hang out. Besides the clientele, which is mostly couples and young families with children, the restaurant is right across the street from the Richardson police station. I'll bet they never get robbed. I mean safe in the I-don't-want-people-to-stare-at-me sort of way. I am sort of an outsider; I don't look terribly Middle Eastern, I don't wear a hijab and if you didn't know I could be counted on to be there, snarfing down baba ganouj, every Thursday from six to seven, you'd probably wonder what in the heck I was doing there.

Safety is an odd concept to someone who basically grew up without it. That I even know to look for it from time to time surprises me. I somehow missed all the lessons about the things a woman needs to do to stay safe; I don't understand that there are certain parts of town I should never venture into, for example, or that I shouldn't go out by myself at night. Don't know how I missed 'em, but I did. They must have been right after the lessons about how to put on pantyhose and how to combine a hair flip with giggle for maximum attractiveness to the male sex in an alcoholic watering hole, because I never got those either. This whole being female thing is a mystery to me.

Also, the things I expected to be safe never were. School, for example, was not safe. I know I'm not alone in that one; school wasn't safe for a lot of people. But all the Dick and Jane books sure led us to expect that school would be the one place where all our peers would be on our best behavior and nobody would get hurt and everybody would be friendly to everybody else. (Pause here for hysterical laughter.) Church wasn't a whole lot better; between the same kids I spent hours trying to avoid at school and some old white dude in the sky threatening to fry me alive with lightning bolts, it was actually worse in some ways. And home? Uh, forget home. Home is probably the most dangerous place on earth for a ridiculously high number of kids. You'll notice hardly any kid ever gets beaten up or sexually abused or kidnapped or locked in a closet by a complete stranger. No, it's usually mom and dad, and they usually get away with it unless, as sometimes happens, the kid dies.

So you'll forgive me for thinking this world we live in is maybe not terribly safe. I took karate lessons for about three years there, with this idea that at least I'd be prepared when whatever-it-is came at me. Unfortunately, karate wasn't terribly safe either, and I eventually had to quit because I was getting too close to brown belt and I didn't, uh, look the part. (Seriously, whoever heard of a fat karate instructor? That would be like Mr. Miyagi on steroids or something. Crazy.) I could probably still give whatever-it-is a run for its money, though. And stomp on it a few times.

Anyway. For the next thirty-ish days, I'll be having my Thursday night dinners at La Madeleine, where I'm currently munching on an overpriced shrimp salad (oh, excuse me, a salade) and wondering if there's somewhere besides La Madeleine and Hooters that has free wi-fi. Starbucks, maybe, but Starbucks is definitely not safe. They sell frosted scones at Starbucks. That's like the end of the world, worse than doughnuts.

Mini-Post: Channel This!

Pleased to report that after 31 days of July, yours truly pulled off not 34 but 35 kilometers in the ol' pool. That translates to 22 miles, or the breadth of the English Channel. Whoo hoo!

Yep, that's me to the left there, at the 2k marathon swim. Well, half-marathon, anyway; I think 5k would be more fittingly marathonish. Maybe next year. As it was, I started off too fast, didn't realize it until I was almost through with the first hundred meters, tried to slow down, really didn't manage it all that well, and almost crashed and burned at about meter 900. But I kept plodding along, and roughly half an hour later I was done. If I'd known they were gonna let me finish the silly thing, I don't know if I would have signed up. I mean, they said I only had 45

minutes. I figured they'd stop me around meter 1600 or so. But no. They let me go the whole 2000. Those guys.

By the way, look at that crummy foot position, willya? Geez. Gotta work on that.

In other news, I finally have a sun-resistant bathing suit. Fittingly for this, the first day of Ramadan, it's called a burqini. No, this is not me; pictures of me in my burqini are not ready for prime time. But check it out! Hood covers neck, shoulders, and all the easy to burn areas. Long sleeves cover arms and, in my case, even fingers. I had to dispatch the pants forthwith; they were way too long and, uh, floopy. Swapped them for a pair of white leggings, which work fine. I can now go out and swim in the sun without fear for the first time in--like ever. Where was this thing when I was a kid? I could have saved myself certain melanoma. Well, possible melanoma. Well, it could happen, okay? I can't even tell you how many nasty sunburns I had between one and eighteen. I test-drove it last weekend at Hurricane Harbor and it worked fine. No, I didn't wear it for the marathon swim; it does have an unfortunate habit of slowing me down just a little.

And, by the way, to my Muslim readers, if I have any: I get it. Muslim women have told me time and again that they feel safe when they cover up. Yeah, it's a religious obligation and it shows their devotion to God and so on, but my tour guides to the Muslim world (both of them) told me that they just feel safe under the hijab. I get it. The second I put on the burqini for the first time and realized that nobody would be staring at my ass because they wouldn't be able to find it, I got it. Safe from the sun, safe from prying eyes. Too bad Buddhists don't make a fashion statement this way because I'd do it. I really would.

Talk Thursday: Hangin' at Afrah

This is a blog post that almost wasn't. I discovered today that if you want your laptop to work when you sit down to dinner at your favorite Middle Eastern restaurant, you had better not leave it in your car all day when it's 35 degrees outside. The darn thing gets frozen, or rather, the battery does. I brought the laptop in here and tried to fire it up and it just sat there looking at me like a big dumb plasma screen, which is what I call it sometimes when I'm utterly frustrated. (Other times I threaten to harvest its parts for programmable toaster ovens. That usually does the trick.) Anyway, it occurred to me that if I warmed up the battery, the rest of the laptop might fall into line. So the battery spent some quality time stuffed down my shirt while I tried to write my post on my BlackBerry. Uh, not possible (the BlackBerry part), the browser doesn't recognize where the text is supposed to go. But a sojourn down the shirt seemed to do the trick. (Indeed, it has for many.) The next time I tried the laptop, it fired right up. We'll see how long that lasts, but at the moment we're okay (knock on Formica).

In case you ever wondered where I crank out these little musings on things big, small, gay, literary, religious, weird and bipolar, most of 'em get written right here; a restaurant called Afrah in the heart of Richardson, Texas. It's at the corner of Greenville and Belt Line Road, and it used to be a bakery, and before that it was a Braum's. I'm only bringing that up because they make the best pita bread in the entire known universe (yes, better than Fadi's; it's close, but it's the truth) and some of the spirit of Braum's and the bakery must have stayed around because there's this mildly sweet cinnamony yummyness about the pita bread that just makes you want to eat more of it. (Great place for a compulsive overeater to hang out. Yeah. Well, most nights I hold myself to a piece and a half.)

Afrah is across the street from the police station, about a block away from the Islamic Center, and within shouting distance of two or three colleges. The clientele tends to be youngish, Middle Eastern, and often traditionally dressed. Whole families, speaking Arabic or Farsi (I can't tell the difference, except that one is kind of softer on the vowel sounds) troop in and take over long tables. Arabic businessmen come in and hang out and shoot the breeze with the owner, a nice guy whose name I don't know but he seems to know me. Once in a while you get an older couple or a few police officers. And then there's, uh, me, the white chick with the enormous, uh, tracts of land. I kinda don't fit in.

Well, I guess everybody's used to me, because with the exception of one of the businessmen and some of the kids, nobody stares at me much anymore. Which is good, because I love this place. The pita bread is, as I may have mentioned, out of this world, but they also make the best hummus and baba ganouj in the entire tri-county area, and a chicken shwawarma that's not only fantastic, but will also keep all your enemies away for the next three days (serious garlic and serious yum). I really don't do sugar anymore so the desserts are kind of wasted on me, but they have about five different kinds of baklava, ten different kinds of gelato, two or three different kinds of cake and assorted homemade cookies that I usually end up buying and taking home for Joan.

My favorite thing about Afrah? The free wi-fi. No question. Oh, and they have a buffet on weekdays during lunchtime, and after sunset during Ramadan. But try getting near the place for the post-Ramadan festivities. It's standing room only. For reals. So one month a year I have to go without cinnamony pita bread. Besides, I kind of feel like it's not my party. But I might get up the nerve this year. We shall see.

Okay, I just got my 15-minute-warning on my cell phone for my OA meeting. Is time to wrap up and head out. If you're ever in North Central Dallas, stop by this place and have all the pita bread you can get down. And try the appetizer platter; it's a great introduction to the kinds of food that are available here. Tell them Jen sent you. The white chick with the enormous... yeah.

Saturday Shocker: Big Country Rides Again!!

You kids aren't gonna believe this. I'm not even sure I believe it, but I've verified it by three independent sources
(source one) (source two) (source three) so it must be true. So here they are, the words I never thought I'd type again: Big Country is back!! The band has some limited tour dates set for January 2011 in London, Newcastle and Liverpool. The tour is to be called "Back in a Big Country" and more dates are expected to be added later on, especially in Scotland. Unless it's spectacularly successful, I expect we can write off a U.S. megatour with a three-night stop in Dallas/Fort Worth, but hey, a girl can dream, can't she?

Now, let's deal with the first and most obvious question: No, this ain't your mama Jen's Big Country. We'll have to call this Big Country Mark Three,* seeing as one of the founding members, Stuart Adamson, rudely killed himself about nine years ago. (Yes, it really was that long ago, and no, I'm still not over it. I'm not sure I'll ever be over it. Lying sack of...Well, anyway:) The surviving three original members, drummer Mark Brzezicki, guitarist Bruce Watson, and bassist Tony Butler are all back, and Bruce Watson's son Jamie will also be joining the band on guitar. (Hard to believe Bruce Watson has a grown son. I swear the guy was nineteen years old just last week.)

And the vocalist will be (drum roll, please) Mike Peters of The Alarm, and if there's a more brilliant move in the hiring of a lead vocalist, I ain't seen it yet. (Sorry, Sammy Hagar. I'm sure you were a runner up, though.) Mr. Peters is the throaty guy behind 80s hits "The Stand," "68 Guns" and "Sold Me Down the River", and thankfully he's just listed as a "guest vocalist." The Alarm being quite the awesome ensemble themselves, it would be a shame to break them up permanently. Besides, The Alarm is the middle of its thirtieth anniversary tour. (I'll pause for a second and let that sink in. Thirtieth. Anniversary. Tour. Yeah. Me too.)

Tickets are running 22.50 euro, which is about $40 bucks U.S., and airline tickets from Dallas to London for that week of January are running around $1300. If I play with the dates there and back I can get it down to about a thousand, but there's still the hotel room and meals and all that. So, realistically, I can forget about this one unless by some miracle I get a book contract between now and then. (Hey you. Yes, you in New York City. You know you're thinking about it.) Ironically, this would be the fourth time I've traveled via larga distancia to see Big Country play somewhere. (If Mohammed won't come to the mountain...) I know the third time is a charm, but does the fourth time count for anything? I'd better be careful. Last time I got smooched. Who knows what could happen. Course I'm, um, a little older now.

Hey, by way of countering some idiot pastor in Florida who does not bear mentioning here, today is Buy a Quran Day. If you buy it at Amazon, your purchase will be counted. Belated happy New Year to my Jewish friends and Eid ul-Fitr to my Muslim friends. And for all of us American folk, I wish the flags weren't at half-mast today.

*Purists and those of us with nothing better to do than remember odd and obscure facts will tell you that the Big Country most of us remember is Big Country Mark Two. Big Country Mark One consisted of Stuart Adamson, Bruce Watson, two keyboard players and a clarinetist and existed just long enough to open two dates for Alice Cooper before nosediving out of existence. I am not making this up. Except about the clarinetist, I'm not 100% certain about that.

A Buddhist Blogs About Muslims on a Pagan Holiday.

Playing in the background: Game 3 of the Series. Go Philly!

The first Muslim I ever met was a young woman at a hotel where I was working in college. It was a horrible job--making beds, scrubbing floors, cleaning up after the BYU basketball team (don't ask) after a tournament, stuff like that. She was a Western woman, grew up somewhere in Wisconsin, married a Muslim and decided to convert - not because he asked her to, although he did, but because she decided it would be easier on the kids to just have one religion in the house. I kind of beg to differ on that point - I think kids do better if they're exposed to lots of different religions - but hey, it wasn't my house and they weren't my kids. Anyway, she was nice. Shockingly normal. The only time I remember her religion coming up was that one day she got a hole in the knee of her pants (which she wore under her cute little regulation maid's dress) and insisted on going home to change, unlike moi who would have just shrugged and kept working.

The second Muslim I ever met was the accountant in a library office where I worked. He was from India. He was Muslim but his wife's people were Hindu so he also practiced the Hindu traditions, about which he said some Muslims have a problem, but no Hindus did (this doesn't surprise me; Hindus have about 3 million gods, and I have no idea how they keep them all straight.) Once I heard him talking to his wife on the phone in one of the 3 million languages they speak in India (one per god?) and he suddenly switched to Arabic halfway through the conversation. I turned my head because the transition from round vowels and consonants to sharp pointy Arabic was obvious even to moi, a rather unschooled (at this point) child of the world. When he got off the phone I asked him what all that was about and he said that there were some things it was simply not appropriate to discuss in certain languages. Serious eyebrow raise over that. Once I asked him once which religion he preferred and he said, "All roads lead to downtown Phoenix." I still remember that fondly because I've always thought the idea of an eternal paradise is basically incompatible with human nature, and if we go to downtown Phoenix when we die, it would make a lot more sense to me. If you're good, you can go to the ballpark. If you're really bad, you have to go to the kids' science museum.

The third Muslim I ever met was at a job I took in 2005 to help out Katrina survivors. She was from I think Qatar (might have been Kuwait; I remember a hard sound at the beginning - I suck at memorizing countries of the world). She invited me to mosque and I was actually on the verge of accepting before I weaseled out. She got after me as to why and I sheepishly admitted that the Muslims would never take me. She found this concept shocking and asked why. I finally told her I was a lesbian. After a couple of long blinks, she said, "Oh, that's no problem. In my country, both of you just marry same husband. No problem." I was kind of surprised because I'd been given to understand that Muslims were pretty strict about homosexual behavior. She laughed and said, "Well, if you were boys, big problem! But two girls, no problem."

I dunno why I'm bringing this up except that I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I hang out at Afrah! a lot (best pita bread EVER) and I was just thinking the other day, "If I'd been born in a Muslim household, would I be a good Muslim?" I think the answer is probably, if my third friend was right and I didn't live in Saudi Arabia. Way too conservative for me there. But then, I grew up in a Christian household and somehow still ended up being a Buddhist so what does that prove? You can be a Buddhist and a Christian at the same time (don't tell some of the Christians that though; they might not like it) so I imagine you could also be a Buddhist and a Muslim at the same time (probably same issue as with the Christians) but the Buddhists would not care if you were gay, straight, Lebanese, Sikh, Hindu or anything else. We'll pretty much take anybody who wants to let go of greed, anger and ignorance and cultivate peace, love and understanding. That doesn't make us the going faith, though. Just one among many. I'm a pretty good Buddhist when I'm not a bad one.

So Easy, A Cave Man Can Do It.

Wow. Two blog posts in two days. This is probably a record.

I'm a big fan of the Geico cave man commercials. As a denizen of the litigation industry, I'm not a big fan of Geico, but that's a whole nother blog post. In case you missed the whole series, a couple of Neanderthals wander around modern day society, being tough and cool, hanging with friends, picking up pretty girls, bowling, whatever, and then one of them sees a poster or billboard for Geico Insurance with the tag line, "So Easy A Cave Man Can Do It." Instantly all the fun's over. I think they had a brief TV series that kind of went down in flames after accusations of racism. Something about Rev. Fred Phelps pronouncing "God Hates Brow Ridges," or maybe it had something to do with the Neandertal Anti-Defamation League.

Anyway, the most recent one has a cave man walking up to a display of TVs, pausing to chat on his BlackBerry, then looking up in time to see the Geico commercial. I think this one is my favorite. He tears off his glasses, throws aside his BlackBerry, takes off his shirt and runs out into the rain while the music behind him says something like "I gotta be who I am."

Reason this comes up is that my friend Jackie had a gig today at this Episcopal church. I told her I'd be there because I love to hear her sing, and because her original songs are by turns witty, scathing, irreverent and sad. Course at this one she was going to play mainly religious material but that was okay. It was some kind of "intergenerational healing service", where you pray for tragedies that have afflicted your family in the past and for stuff you've got going on now. Which I can get behind, Buddhist that I am. At least until I saw the long list of "family tragedies," which the priest read out loud. Among them: Domestic violence. Rape. Murder. Suicide, mental illness, homosexuality, lesbianism, drug addiction, miscarriages --

Uh. Hold it. Back up. What?

He kept going. Alcoholism, estrangement of a family member, "spiritualism," witchcraft, Satanism, tarot card reading, divination, having psychic abilities, cruelty to animals, family members that aren't part of the Judeo-Christian tradition such as Buddhists and Muslims; habitual criminal behavior, participating in genocide...

And there I sat, the lesbian Buddhist Tarot card reader with the mild psychic powers and the Wiccan wife who, uh, practices witchcraft. At least occasionally.

I gotta tell ya, I have heard gay people called many interesting things, but gay-person-as-"family tragedy" was a new one on me. I mean, if you had a gay son and you spent most of his teenage years telling him that God hates gay people and so he turned around and killed himself one day, that would be a family tragedy. (And you would be a moron.) But I don't know of any faith that has a ritual of mourning because a niece just admitted that she, uh, kind of likes girls. Likewise psychic powers. I mean, you don't ask to have psychic powers and you don't ask to be gay. You're either born that way or you're not.

And having a Muslim or a Buddhist in the family is a "family tragedy"? Up there with domestic violence, rape, mental illness and forGodsake genocide? Certainly the members of this church are entitled to think that their religion is the correct one, but do they really say to their friends, "My brother in law is a Muslim," and expect the same pat on the shoulder and the "I'm so sorry" that they'd get if they said, "My brother-in-law beat up and murdered my sister"?

Half the time it doesn't even occur to me I'm gay. I'm kind of post-gay. I mean, yeah, I'm married to a woman, and we have cats and own a house together, but we're so boring we could put your teeth to sleep and we live in a 1950s neighborhood with lots of other boring people and I doubt we occasion much comment from anybody around. The neighborhood kids would probably refer to us as "the two fat ladies" before they said "the two lesbians" or whatever less-than-flattering equivalent term kids are using these days. I go to work and pay bills and clean house and do laundry and really lead a rather unremarkable life. If I had to list my defining characteristics, I'd probably put being a lesbian fifth or sixth on the list, underneath being Scandinavian, fat, liberal, a writer, and Buddhist with a Lutheran background. It just doesn't enter my consciousness that often. Until something like this happens and there I am, the cave man from the Geico commercial, putting down my bowling ball and walking off in disgust as the pinsetter that reads "So Easy A Cave Man Can Do It" comes down at the end of the lane.

So I didn't have the option of tearing off my glasses and running dramatically away into the rain to be a cave man. I'm not sure how one runs off and is dramatically a lesbian Buddhist Tarot card reader, anyway, because I am one pretty much every day and I don't think I'd do anything different if I were, say, a polysexual Hindu palm reader. Instead I had to wait for a break in the music so that I could get up and leave without embarrassing Jackie. If she hadn't been there, I'd have left a lot sooner. Or made a scene. Or maybe both. Hard to know. And now I'm home and writing this blog post and trying to decide if it would be okay to mention that the church was SAINT LUKE'S EPISCOPAL CHURCH ON ROYAL LANE AT PRESTON or if that would be bad manners.

I wonder if anybody else there had a gay friend or family member. I imagine so; practically everyone does. I wonder if anybody else there had any idea how casually they were inflicting terrible damage on these folks by equating their gay and lesbian family members with wife-beating genocidal Satan-worshipping rapists. I imagine Muslims get used to being associated with suicide bombers (though they probably never like it) and Wiccans get used to being lumped into the same category as Satanists (even though Satan is a Christian concept that has no place in this pre-Christian tradition). But I hope they don't. I hope they're outraged every single time, and I hope they get in people's faces every single time. There nothing wrong with being gay, lesbian, Muslim, Buddhist or psychic. People don't choose these things; they are chosen. So plainly God wants them that way. And if God wants them that way, they aren't "family tragedies." As a Buddhist might tell you, they just are.

How A Buddhist Celebrates Ramadan

In case y'all didn't know this, today is the first day of Ramadan. That's the ninth month in the Arabic calendar, which coincides with God's revelation of the Qur'an to Mohammed on Laylat al-Qadr. It's also called the "dry month" or the "time of short rations". Observant Muslims use this month as a time of fasting and purification, ask God forgiveness for sins, ask for guidance and try to focus on modest, non-self-indulgent thoughts.

Since it's obviously impossible to not eat for a month and live (yeah, yeah, I know; Jesus did it, Buddha did it, etc - okay, but they were divine beings, gang) most Muslims fast from sunup to sundown. As an ex-member of a Lutheran street gang I used to do this on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and it was not fun. I never felt particularly religious either. Just cranky and out of sorts and occasionally unconscious (that hypoglycemia is a killer; just ask Paul Blart, Mall Cop.) So I wouldn't do too well at Ramadan. Luckily for me, there is an out; if you're physically or mentally ill, or there's some other medical reason you shouldn't fast, you can make up for it by doing service for the poor. If I were Muslim, I'd just park myself wherever the poor hang out for the entire month. Believe me, that would be easier. (And also safer. One should not drive while having a blood sugar crash.)

As someone who thinks Muslims are like totally cool (They pray in public and have sex in private! Totally the opposite of us Yanks! When they say inshallah they really mean it! They cook the world's best akawi pie!), this is a rough month for me. No, I don't have to fast from sunup to sundown, but I have to do without my favorite restaurant, Afrah. More to the point, I have to do without Afrah's pita bread, which is the best pita bread on the planet and makes that dry stuff you buy at the store taste like what it is: bird food. If you live anywhere near the DFW area and you haven't been to Afrah, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. C'mon, you're a swell person, you deserve a treat. It's in Richardson at the corner of Greenville Avenue and Belt Line Road just east of the 75. Just don't check it out between sunup and sundown until September 19, folks. Or is it the 22nd? Carp. I can never keep track.

During Ramadan, Afrah is closed until sundown, when it opens and throws a big buffet dinner for the low, low price of only $14.99. Cheap! I've never actually been to the buffet dinner, though, because I kind of feel like it's not my party, if you get my drift. I mean, my sponsor (who is Jewish) and I meet there all the time ("A Jew and a Buddhist go to a Mediterranean restaurant...") but I'd feel like the Irish Catholic crashing the Mexican Christmas Eve party, or, if that's too much of a religious in-joke, I'd feel like the gregarious New Yorker at a coffee-and-bars after church social in North Dakota. Still too obscure? Okay, I'd feel like the family member everyone felt obligated to invite to the reunion but secretly hoped wouldn't show. Still, I may try it this year anyway. As Joan pointed out, I'm a "regular." And I do start seriously jonesing for their pita bread a week or so in.

At the moment, I still have three (count 'em, 3) pieces of Afrah pita bread in my kitchen. They'll probably be stale by tomorrow, at which point they should by all rights be made into pizzas. Then we'll enter the pita bread drought and I'll just have to survive somehow. Gee, I don't sound like I have a problem with food or anything, do I? HA HA HA!! And here you thought I just went to OA meetings to hear myself talk!!