This post will convince Mosh that I miss him.  But let’s not give him that pleasure.  Maybe I do, or maybe I just miss my lunch buddy.  He’s been seconded to a place where yuppies congregate and my only advice to him was :

If you get cocky when you come back, I’d skin you alive.

See?  I do love him.  In our crooked, wicked ways.

Anyways.

He smokes, you see.  The kind that never walks into a building without first lighting up a cig, not unlike a swimmer taking a long deep breath before that dive.  But he makes no qualm over the fact that it is bad and that in Islam, smoking is forbidden as it is harmful to the body.

One lunch date, he regaled us with the conversation he had with one of our ustaz (religious scholar) at the office.  This guy is very diplomatic and he started by saying that smoking is the only act of putting something is your body without saying Bismillah (In the Name of God) which Muslims are stronghly recommneded to do before any act.  I thought he did great but not going straight for the gut, but beating round the bush before he nails his point.

Mosh could only smile his plastic smile and nodded.  He told us, he simply had no answer or could  not even come up with any plausible argument to counter that.  True.  True.  True.

Then he said, after that, every time he feels like smoking, he feels that he should recite Bismillah.

I burst out in laughter because gosh, mosh!  You’re completely missing the tree for the forest.  You’re not supposed to baca bismillah before smoking, you’re supposed to stop it altogether.

But then again, he’d smell like a normal person.  What fun would that be eh?