So I'm sitting in a rooftop bar/restaurant called Uptown, atop the Ankars Suites in Ramallah; if you try to google it, very little turns up, which is both 1) a pity, since it's lovely up here, and b) odd because it seems like everything is online - shucks, if photos of you drinking too much and mooning the camera can turn up online (that's not me, folks), why can't information and a map about something so nice be there too?

I'm watching the waitstaff put out plates of these gigantic dates on the tables in preparation for breaking the fast at sundown - the first thing you taste for the Iftar meal is something sweet - and I'm stricken by these ideas of piety.

For instance, I was raised in a fairly conservative, American evangelical Christian fashion, and we were told that we weren't to "smoke, drink or chew, or go with those who do," and holiness meant abstemiousness; but here in the Middle East, the Christians are the ones who make the best local beer and can smoke cigarettes during Ramadan (which was perversely liberating - I almost feel like smoking a pack of cigarettes just because I can. Then again, with the number of smokers here I'm going to have to quit second-hand smoking when I get home), eating bacon while the Muslims, who are refraining from eating and drinking, grow fainter and fainter during the day.

What's the point of all of this, besides awesome self-control and being bereft of the wonder that is Spam? I was told a story about a man here, who because it was the holy month went to the friend from whom he had been estranged for the past so many years, took him by hand, and said, friend, let us be reconciled because we should be at peace during Ramadan. Which calls to mind that true religion is to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and that the peacemakers will be called the sons of God.

Now if only the people behind the bar would stop playing "Unbreak My Heart" over and over again (the rest of the world is where pop music goes to die) - they're sons of something else, dammit.