rchizzle

[rchizzle]

Unmasking Yourself

Performed at Subcontinental Drift in Washington D.C., October 2017

There’s a phrase that’s become pretty common-place in my lexicon

“I don’t know”

And whether I say it in Spanish

Yo no se

Or Bengali

Ami jaani na

The phrase sounds pretty innocuous - nothing too charged about the term

Except it strikes like lightning when it’s uttered in my head

I say it more in my mind than I’d ever speak it out loud

Because out loud - why would I admit that I don’t have the answers

Or that I haven’t had the answers for some time

It’s funny - when you’re young and confused you just assume that things will work themselves out

And people always told me, It’ll make more sense when you get older

So that was my only hope

But Obi-Wan Kenobi never showed up

So when faced with many of life’s questions, my mind coughed up a redundant response

What do you want to do with your life

I dunno

What are you looking for in a companion

I dunno

Is your job the right one

I dunno

Why do you feel unhappy and numb more and more these days

I dunno

Now that I’m older and still very much confused - I feel like “I don’t know” isn’t good enough

Quite frankly, I’m tired of not knowing. It’s not cute anymore.

I’m tired of feeling of like the only certainty I know is my own uncertainty

And to say it’s affected my self-esteem, my self-confidence, my self-image- well that would be an understatement

With all that’s going on in the news these days,it was easy to miss, but this month on October 10th, there was a worldwide mental health awareness day

And I think it’s great that more of society is starting to recognize and accept that mental health issues are a real thing and that they should be treated with the same sense of urgency that we would other illnesses - it’s not in the headlines like Zika or opioid abuse, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a crisis

And if I may be so bold, I’d have to point out that the greater South Asian community, especially the older generation, still have a ways to go in seeing, hearing, and believing mental illness. But maybe there’s some more movement on the issue.

But the problem for me is that just being aware of the problem doesn’t make it any better.

Just having knowledge about my depression and anxiety doesn’t mean I know how to conquer it

I know that the first step to solving a problem is admitting there is one

But what do you do after that? What if you’re stuck and you feel lost

And you know there’s something to fix, but you don’t know if you have the tools to fix it and if you did, you’re not sure how to use them

There isn’t a shitty Ikea manual and allen wrench for life

So I do the only thing that I feel like I have any sense of control over, I create:

I cook something

I clean a room

I play something on the guitar

I sing something

I write something

I don’t always do this. I have my fair share of days where I just watch Netflix and don’t talk to anyone besides the delivery guy.

But lately - once a month to be exact - I decide to take some of my creations - and I perform them.

Now I’ve written long diatribes on whether Back to the Future Part II is a masterpiece or whether it has some obvious plot holes to address, so believe me when I say I’m not a man of few words

But the feeling of performing for me - I can’t describe it. I have no words. It’s transcendent. I feel alive. Like a superhero.

All the nerves leading up to it. All the angst hoping that you don’t mess up. I guess that causes some adrenaline to kick in.

Because in the seconds when you’re about to start and the lights are shining and mic is on - you understand why so many people would think of this as their worst nightmare. But then something odd happens.

I just close my eyes. I breathe. I just start. And autopilot takes over

And for a brief moment - the world ceases to be a burden and nothing else matters. And you share a piece of your soul to all those willing to see it.  

And as quick as the feeling comes, it also goes away. And the flood of endorphins and emotions that you get - you’re trying to hold on to it for as long as you can before the high leaves you. But like a small flame on a windy day, the light is gone, leaving little behind except a faint wisp of its existence

But it’s nice to know you can have that feeling again sometimes. That you can generate a sense of belonging and purpose. That you still have the power to impress yourself. And create something that the world has never seen.

Even if it’s only for a moment.

You know in one of the Batman movies - there’s a cool line about the fact that Batman’s real mask isn’t the rubber one he puts over his face. It’s the one he wears as Bruce Wayne around Gotham. Because that’s when he’s pretending to be someone he’s not.

So generally after these performances are over, I ask myself a question? What are you going to do next time? The answer is pretty familiar.

I don’t know. But I sure am looking forward to taking off my Bruce Wayne mask again.

[rchizzle]

Home Is Where The Confusion Is

The question always haunts me. Where are you from? Where is home? It’s certainly not the first time anyone has ruminated on that idea, but that doesn’t make it any easier to answer. Is it some ancestral tie to your heritage? Is it where you grew up? Is it a state of being? Is it where the person and people you love are? Is it where you can get a paycheck? Is it where you built some Ikea furniture that took a long ass time, and now there’s no way you’re leaving and having to reassemble it? I feel envy at people who have the confidence and deep roots to know the answer to that question. To know where they belong, to know where things make sense. Where they maybe don’t feel like a fish out of water, feel accepted, and see a future for themselves.

Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately - I haven’t yet found that place. It’s what’s kept me moving around this last decade and allowed me to meet more people and see more of the world. Still I do yearn to have an answer. The place I grew up is becoming less and less the place I think of as home, but more where I studied for the SAT and where old pictures of me with terrible puberty mustaches adorn the wall. The last time I went “home,” I found a Blockbuster membership card in my desk and saw how many VHS tapes we still had, and realized it was more of a museum of old, albeit good, memories than a home. I suppose I have some apologies to make here - my lack of an answer doesn’t mean there aren’t places I don’t love. Parts of my heart will always reside in North Carolina and thinking about times in Chapel Hill, Asheville, and the Triangle brings a smile to my face. I’ve left parts of my heart in Phoenix and Peru. Santa Fe had my heart for a summer.  As I’ve gotten older, the streets of Delhi or Kolkata in India bring me in touch with a sense of revery I very much relish every time I go there. And currently, it’s fair to say parts of my heart have found some oxygen in the DC area. But maybe call it privilege or “fomo,” but for some reason - there is a part of my heart that has never felt fully satiated anywhere. Like there was always one more place I’d go to and be able to say, “Yep. This is it.”

Feeling at home is sometimes compounded by the fact that I maybe have never fully come to terms with the duality of being both American and being Indian - something I think a lot of folks with immigrant parents can relate to. Having to balance two cultures and the raw individualism of America with the family emphasis of my upbringing makes it hard to decide what you want to be. Even to this day, I think I confuse people with the pronunciation of my name probably because I’m confused as to what to choose. Growing up I went by “Robby” in school and at formal functions -- so I just resonate with that. At home and among relatives and other brown friends - it would be Roby (Ro-bee), but even that varied depending on what part of India the people we were hanging with were from and somehow it just felt easier to separate the two worlds. It’s not really an attempt to whitewash my identity - I just don’t really have a good answer for why I do this, and it feels too late to change it now. But that’s not really the point here - this isn’t a post relitigating my name (that’s for another day).

The post is more of a question really. How do you figure out where home is? Is it where you learned rituals of behavior and where you had your “firsts.” It’s hard not to think of home as that place where you tried so many things for the first time - where you had your first kiss, your first beer, the first time you drove a car, first time you came home high and told your mom you had allergies, the first time you had to clear the browser history. Okay maybe some of those were a little me-centric, but you get the point. It’s hard to deny the influence of the place where you made some of your earliest friends and first were exposed to so many things in the world. But to say that took more precedence than college? Or the first place you had a job? Or the first place you really fell in love? Or the first place you had to cook for yourself on the regs? Is it the place you’ve lived the longest where it just feels familiar? Or is it the place where you had the most intense experiences and you dream about going back?

The reason I ask is because I’m at a bit of a crossroads right now. To be perfectly honest, I keep telling myself that where I am right now is where I want to stay. I’ve put in a lot of time and investment into building a life here in DC. And for the most part, I really do enjoy it. But since my next paycheck is not going to be dependent on this place in a couple months - I actually have a rare opportunity at this stage in my life to decide where I should go next - maybe it’s here and maybe it’s not. And because of that - the idea of going somewhere where you feel at home really appeals to me.

The problem is, I’m not really sure where that is. If you have any advice on how you figure that out, I’m all ears. 

[rchizzle]

The World Needs More Great Writers

The world lost one of the greats this week. And I say the world because that’s where Anthony Bourdain lived. Not in an apartment in New York. Not on a film set in Hollywood. Not even on scooters and a roadside stall somewhere in Hanoi. He couldn’t be restricted to one place and his curiosity and wanderlust is what makes us miss him so.

He walked amongst all the peoples and ate the food of the world in a way that created a whole new genre. He was to travel shows what Jon Stewart was to news satire, what Johnny Carson was to late night TV. He created a dream that few of us even knew we wanted and then it’s all we could think about. I doubt there hasn’t been many among us who once thought “that would be my dream job.” That famous line from Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, “That’s what I do. I drink and I know things,” probably could have been uttered by Tony years ago if you simply changed drink to eat. Not that he didn’t enjoy both. He gave us all the hope that we could be fun and world-changing simultaneously.

He was remarkably equitable in the people he attracted- resonating with misfits and rebel artists with his irreverence but impressing Oxford-shirt wearing historians and politicians with his incisive sense of intelligence. He was able to show the beauty of the food of Michelin-starred chefs in Denmark or the pure joy of eating the best tacos you’ve ever had in Oaxaca from an abuela. He was good about giving answers about the world, but he was even better about asking the right questions.

But his best skill - which I think it’s hard to overstate just how good at it he is - is his writing. He’s just so good at so many things that we forget where it all starts - from his ability to convey feelings and ideas with words. He could make a hell of an omelet but his ability to tell you why it’s important to be able to make an omelet and what it signifies about your desire to get another person fed is the thing that always launches him to the stratosphere for me. He was poetic without trying to be. Eloquent without being condescending. He wrote simple prose layered with some poignant bookend sentences that rejected and upheld norms and truths at the same time. It’s the stuff that makes you want to start writing wherever you are. Hell, it’s why I dream about leaving my job behind, teaching English in some village somewhere where the food is good and the beer is cheap, and spending my nights meeting new people and writing about the world.

It’s a bit of a cliche is it not? Wanting to be a writer. Wanting to devote your life to coffee shops and mental soliloquies, pads of scribbled paper and introspection so that you can crank out the next great American novel that nobody will quite understand. At least not while you’re alive (if you’re truly one of the greats). It’s a weird mix of narcissism and vulnerability that you need to be a writer - to decide that your thoughts are worth sharing for everyone to point at and judge. Many people eschew it, decide that they’ll leave it to someone else. And I guess if I hadn’t already been preachy enough, I will implore you not to leave it someone else. I would argue that given the craziness of the world right now - and despite the fact that it doesn’t build any bridges, it doesn’t create an app to make your life easier, and it certainly doesn’t solve any of the major policy problems of the world, the world needs good writing more than ever.

At its best it helps you feel less alone in the world. And at its worst it’s a chance to experience something from a perspective that isn’t necessarily yours. We live in weird times - connected to so many but attached to so few. Information is ever present but we sometimes feel like we don’t know any truths at all. I’d advocate that writing might bind us as a people in a way that few things can - the other two that happen to cross my mind are music and food. That’s because they’re all universal emblems of what we do when we want to show who we are. The food we eat shows what we value. The songs we sing show what brings us harmony. And we write to tell you what we believe.

We all experience the world in different places and at different times, so we tell stories to take you there. We write odes and memoriams to show our respect. We write fiction to imagine worlds we haven’t seen. And we write nonfiction to remember the world we have so we might ascend a little higher the next go around.

So as an ode to one of my idols and someone I watched with admiration from afar - I salute you Mr. Bourdain. You made us want to embrace the world, warts and all, instead of retreat from it. You exposed the human condition as beautiful not because of its perfections but because of its scars. You made us believe that all you need is a good drink in your hand, a meal made with love, and a person across the table who you can look out at the horizon with, and that you’d start to believe that even if the world doesn’t make a lot of sense - it can still be a place of wonder and inspiration.

To all of you who decided to break out of the current trend of not reading anything longer than a tweet - thanks for your efforts in making it through this. It felt good to write. But what feels even better is the hope that maybe you’ll write something too. Because that’s what I’ll miss most about Tony. Not his stories. But the ones he was able to get others to tell.

[rchizzle]

I dig the disco beat to this song. Sort of a mix of chill meets funk. 

[rchizzle]

“When a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born - and this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.”

Anne Lamot

[rchizzle]

You rise as high as your dominant aspiration, you descend to the level of your lowest concept of yourself. Free your mind and your ass will follow.

[rchizzle]

“Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.”

[rchizzle]

I mean, this is just too good. Best edit I've ever seen. EVER. 

[rchizzle]

“But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.”

- Paulo Coelho 

[rchizzle]

“Kill all my demons, and my angels might die too.”

Tennessee Williams

[rchizzle]

"Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast...a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: You will outlive the bastards."

Edwin Abbey

[rchizzle]

"Those who choose to dance will always be considered insane by those that cannot hear the music."

George Carlin

[rchizzle]

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m not sure who the first person was who said that. Probably Shakespeare. Or maybe Sting. But at the moment, it’s the sentence that best explains my tragic flaw: my inability to change. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The more I get to know other people, the more I realize it’s kind of everyone’s flaw. Staying exactly the same as long as possible, standing perfectly still… It feels better somehow. And if you are suffering, at least the pain is familiar. Because if you took the leap of faith, went outside the box, did something unexpected… Who knows what other pain might be waiting out there. Chances are it could be even worse. So you maintain the status quo. Choose the road already traveled and it doesn’t seem that bad. Not as far as flaws go. You’re not killing anyone… Except maybe yourself a little. When we finally do chage, I don’t think it happens like an earthquake or an explosion, where all of a sudden we’re like this different person. I think it’s smaller than that. The kind of thing most people wouldn’t even notice unless they looked at us really, really close. Which, thank God, they never do. But you notice it. Inside you that change feels like a world of difference. And you hope this is it. This is the person you get to be forever… that you’ll never have to change again. But somehow you knew from the beginning this would never be the case.

[rchizzle]

Pictures from the Inca Trail. One of the best adventures of my life. 

[rchizzle]

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” — John Lennon

[rchizzle]

Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made Of

Brown. Stingy. Yellow. Red. Relentless. In the morning. At Night. Bloody. Big……

                So for those of you that know me a little too well, I am in fact not talking about my bowel movements. I mean, I sort of am, but I am trying to describe the bugs that pretty much permeate the entire jungle. They were an army, waiting to pretty much make humans their bitch.  This will be my only regret of the jungle, because otherwise, I enjoyed it for what it was – a chance to do something I’ve never done before and likely will not have more opportunities to do.

                In the last couple weeks, I’ve definitely had some firsts – having a monkey sleep in my lap in the jungle and working construction – hence the title of the blog – concrete jungle…. Yeah I know, I’m kind of a dork, but a dork you probably have grown to love. Anyhow, both experiences have been great – it’s definitely added to my repertoire of experiences – now I can say I’ve swung from a Tarzan type rope swing, and built a wall out of adobe bricks and plaster. The bucket list that I will inevitably have one day will now be a little shorter. Ri-dit-doooo.

                Anyhow, the pictures of the jungle probably do a little more justice than describing it lyrically, but still I feel obliged to write about what it was like. So, a group of 10 people from my house went to the jungle – mostly girls, sans me and another cool guy named Patrick. Our stated objective was to get to a place called Attalaya Reserve and help with reforestation. The journey there was pretty long, consisting of driving on what could only be described as the narrowest roads ever that literally look like they were carved into the side of the mountain. However, since it’s the rainy season (something that happens every year mind you, but nobody has seemed to adapt the roads for this), many times there have been massive landslides or flooding of the roads which makes them pretty much impassable for hours at a time. Anyhow, once we got to Attalaya Reserve, our only way to get in was via an “arollo,” essentially a suspended cable above a river with a wooden seat that can hold about two people. You pull yourself with this pulley type of system, and then you’re on the other side. Pretty badass entrance, but only charming for so long. So, as far as reforestation goes – we did very little work. We spent some time out on the trail using a machete to cut out some brush that was growing on the trails, and I did chop some bamboo to help secure the fence around the reserve, but that was about it. The rest of the time we sort of just hiked, noted animals, and went swimming/showering in the waterfall.

                I also had the pleasure of “rafting” in the jungle.  So this was a hell of a trip – first of all, on the way there, our car got stuck in the street (the street was flooded and muddy). So we all had to push the car out, and then we got through this town called Pilcopata and to the place where the rafting ends, and doesn’t start. So, we were very confused, but finally they found the guy that was supposed to be our guide. He had a tourniquet on his thumb because he had cut it on the engine that very day and was taking antibiotics to recover – so it was actually good that we went to the end part because that way we were able to meet up, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it into town for a while. So, he said we needed to get back to the town to start the rafting trip, but what I thought would be us leaving in 20 minutes turned into us sitting in his house for 4 hours, eating some papaya and doing make-shift karaoke – I sang “Tearing Up My Heart” by N’Sync beautifully, and I’m not ashamed. So we finally hitched a ride on a bus to get back into town, and then we sort of carried the raft on our head for a while toward this house. Finally, we sort of got the raft into the water at around 3:00 pm, seeing as how we go to our rafting place at 9:30 am; I would say it was pretty efficient. However, the best part, and I would be the only one who considered it the best because it adds to the story, was the fact that our rafting trip was 30 minutes long in the water, and it was intense because our guide fell out of the raft into a rapid and then our backpack with the money and other things we brought fell into – so our rafting trip turned into a great rescue mission, where yours truly played a big role – I stuck out my oar to rescue the guide, and then I pretty much dived into the river to get our bag – so my confidence definitely grew that day.  

                The rest of the time, we helped out at the reserve, chilled with the monkeys, and read books. It was all in all, a relaxing experience, except for the bugs, and then the infamous bus ride back. Rather than describe it bit by bit, I will leave it to say, it took 19 hours when it should have taken 9 hours. The hold-up was two landslides, 3 drug checks, and multiple stops because the roads were horrible.  Also, the bus was completely full, to the point where an old man practically sat in my lap for a good 4 hours. It would have been a nice spooning if he didn’t smell like a hobo’s band-aid and snore like a dragon. Alas, that is life in the jungle.

                As far as construction goes, it’s been pretty cool. We are helping build a school for pre-school kids, and it involved a lot of putting down of concrete, plastering walls, and making walls of out of adobe bricks. We also do a lot of leveling out of floors and wall areas so that the concrete can be even. It is pretty fulfilling and tiring, but I have to take a quick break from it because my hand got messed up during a biking trip (a story for another day).

                Anyhow, this might have been my longest blog yet, but I felt that it was the most unique experience I've had so far. I am now trying to sort of get back into a groove before I hit the Inca Trail in less than a month. In the meantime, I'm making my own concrete jungle, and it's not New York. It is what it is. 

[rchizzle]

In the jungle, the mighty jungle. Came back with more mosquito bites than I've ever had, "rafted" through part of the Amazon, chilled with monkeys, and was pretty smelly the whole time. Good adventure. Won't be going back though.