Do Unto Others As They Will Do Unto You

Life is a learning process. I used to bug my childhood friend, telling him he looked Jewish. (OK, maybe we all look the same to you non-Semites.) This came back to haunt me: once when I was walking back from work wearing black pants, black shoes, and carrying a black bag and umbrella, a teenager started making gluttoral grunts as I passed. Before I could figure out exactly what he was getting at, the girl next to him said, "Don't make fun of him, my father's Jewish." Another time I was on an airplane sitting next to a born-again Christian. She turned to me all excited and asked, "Are you Israeli?" I guess I kind of looked like the illustrations she'd seen in Bible class. These sorts of things happened a number of times, and each time, I remembered my friend.

Every winter, the skin on my arms dries out, turns red, then gray, and become painfully irritated. My ex-wife would always tell me to moisturize my skin with lotion, but of course, I was too much of a man for that. She would try to convince me by mentioning that sailors use lotion. Now, if you've ever spent any time in the army, you probably don't consider sailors to be the epitome of manliness, so this wasn't a very effective argument. Fast forward to 2006: I moved to Jordan in the winter and went through a tank of diesel (250 JD worth) in under a month. I was terrified of the thought of running out of money that quickly and had no electric water heater, so I decided I'd live with no heat or hot water. Hey, I was tough and complaining was for wusses. My arms turned red, then gray, became extremely irritated, and then eventually, the skin cracked. Whenever I'd shake someone's hands or open a taxi door, my hands would crack and blood would come out. But I was tough and complaining was for wimps. Eventually, the blood became an issue: praying with blood on your clothing is problematic. I couldn't avoid bleeding on my clothes unless I was going to start wearing gloves while getting dressed. This is where the commitment to machismo just had to stop in light of practicality. I started using lotion, and of course, one of my co-workers told me doing so was effeminate. I had it coming. It's called Justice.

Later, I actually learned that anointing one's skin from time to time is sunna, and delaying this until a need arises is makruh (disliked).