- I don't know what it's taste like when it's become Jesus--
- These are the kinds of things that make--
- There was a pig situation, I was like this feels off.
- So I'm eating this--
- There was one Ramadan where basically it was
my lag year between college, my internship, and grad school
and somehow it seems like when you have nothing
to do during Ramadan, fasting is easier
but it's actually the quite opposite.
Being sort of in a routine and doing your daily life
it's a lot easier to fast and so I
was really struggling fasting during this time.
My sister also had a lag year so one Ramadan
we just basically would sleep all day
which is like not the point and then we would break our fast
and then until then we watched Criminal Minds
until sahur time, then we'd eat
and then we'd do it all over again.
And that was my normal life for an entire month.
Like nine seasons and there was one particular episode
that there was a pig situation and we were like
this feels off, this is not something we should be watching.
It was a really scary episode.
People were feeding women to pigs in this episode.
That's not my proudest Ramadan, but it is what it is.
- Okay, okay, one Ramadan I was in the awkward position
of deciding whether to break my fast
with an unconsecrated communion host.
I went to a Catholic high school.
For all the non-Catholics out there,
during mass Catholics take communion,
it's a host, a wafer and some wine.
The Priests like whisper a prayer
over the host, turn it into Jesus, his body
and then they turn the wine into his blood.
So I wasn't sure how to convert, but I really wanted
to know what that wafer tasted like and everyone knew it.
Everyone knew the Muslim wanted
to know what the wafer tasted like.
So Ramadan of my junior year, this nun decides
to make my dreams come true.
She breaks into the school communion stash,
she runs off with a wafer just for me.
She's like here it is, the wafer, the wafer of your dreams.
And I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm fasting.
What am I gonna do?
Everyone's watching me, I think everyone knew I was fasting.
I had like Ramadan breath, anyway, I'm eating it.
And I don't know what it's taste like
when it's become Jesus but before
it becomes Jesus, it tastes like old paper.
So I'm thinking to myself, you know what,
damn I should've asked for the wine too, you know.
If you're gonna go down, might as well go down in flames.
- So a couple of years ago my best friend and I decided
that for Iftar rather than just having
you know, like a regular dinner spread,
we would host a thing called Pizza Olympics.
Where we would order pizza from any place
that we could think of, have it all delivered
to one location and then we would make all of our guests
have a slice of each pizza and then rank them
to determine which one is the best
because we love science and we love pizza
and these are the kinds of things that make
a lot of sense when you haven't eaten for 14 hours.
So we set up our party, all the pizza comes.
It's all Margherita because it
has to be standardized obviously.
This is the Olympics, we care about rigor.
We lay it out and people are getting in line,
getting their pizza and eating it.
And then there's just this guy who's a friend
of someone else's looking at the pizza
with like kind of the judgy face.
And because I'm trying to be gracious
because it is the spirit of Ramadan,
I ask him, hey please take a plate please help yourself.
And then he tells me that he doesn't like pizza,
it's disgusting and it's kind of fattening
and do we have anything else like salad that he would eat.
Who eats salad, nobody eat salad during Ramadan.
The point is fried things and that's when I learned
the real lesson of Ramadan is that while not eating food
and not drinking water can be challenging,
not being really shady is very hard.
(playful music)