Generation F

Dear Narwals,

Today, I will post something very different from the rest of my work, but it just spills out of me at this moment, I must share.

So I was sitting in my friend´s car, in mids of the vibrations of electro-house music. I do not normally listen to it, but this time, it actually relaxed me. It was too loud, too fast, too repetitive. It was exactly what I needed to let go of my thoughts.

And then it hit me hard : it was anastaesia. Sure, a very noisy one, and it didn´t exactly put anyone to sleep, but it numbed my conscious just so well...

This image didn´t let me go for a while, and it started to occur to me that I must not have been the first person to feel that way. Now please look at the facts : we, the so called Y generation (people born from 1983 to 2000) obviously crave something of this sort.
Why else would ASMR channels on YouTube gather astronimic numbers of subscribers, why else do we crave a drink even as teenagers, why do we go to loud clubs, damage out eardrums on cheap-sounding music and enhance this experience by drugs (of whose damaging impacts we have been informed over and over and over again)?

People apparently need something to shut down the inside, or to get excited beyond the ability to listen to those inner voices. So what do the calls inside us say that needs to be unheard? I am no expert in that field, but my answer is : they remind us of reasons to be afraid.

Just look around you. Kids, young, healthy, living in aboundance, must pop pills to fall asleep, drink in order to party. Young adults seem to suffer from identity - and existence crises as soon as the school system sets them free. Just try and ask the next college student you meet about his or her plans after graduation. You will have to hold the stare of terrified eyes before hearing an improvised response.

Sometimes the world just seems full of dementors...

We have been falsely labeled Generation Y, when we really know wery well why. Why we cannot trust our money to keep its value, why we must not expect our government to tell us the truth, why whe do not hope for worldpeace, why we have no means to know if our grandchildren will see snow in winter and panda bears in the wild. We have been very well informed about the reasons to be afraid.

But certainly, the most startling fact is that the ones in charge, our teachers and parents, seemed to have felt the foreshadow. They secretly knew what world they have been passing on to us, who have barely left their arms. How could they abandon their descendence to that collapsing house of cards, they who love and hope for us the most?

Now, dear Narwals, I too feel like a hobbit who has been the ring of Sauron... And where is our Gandalf, do I ask. Where are the eagles that will carry us to the top of the mountain? The thing is, we have never known a peaceful land of green grass and little housings in the hills. Only tales of past promises remind us that it has existed, at least in the minds of our elders. We de not have that sense of peace and idle to come back to.

But we should not underestimate our wise ancestros, for they knew whom they set into the world, and they forged a secret weapon for their children : a quest.

Do you now remember the mysterious phrase "love yourself" and the quiet battle hymn "follow your passion"? That is the magic that keeps us alive, deas Narwals. This is the drive for our Generation Fear.

If the boom of a social network in the midst of an increasingly antisocial world has not yet convinced you of it, then just remember this terrified undergraduate. Not knowing why, not really daring to hope, our generation follows a mysterious path, leading us away from the harbour of tradition and into the loneliness individuality. That drive, I would argue, is responsible for the first Afro-Amerivcan president of the U.S, for a secret organisation of hackers avenging victims of internet violence, for a man ready to go into exile to reveal the truth to a country that will seak to punish him in response.

Sure, we are to some extend selfish when we do it, and understand that passion is a luxury, but that is the only way to go. The present situation, worldwide, stares at us with a bleak expression of disappointment. The collective human search for comfort and improvement has failed us. You know exactly that children have made your shirt, that the chicken meat in your refrigerator has never seen sunlight. The lifestyle that past generation´s struggles have paid the price for, together with the people right now, doing it in silence, far away from your safe home, has not made you a better person, us a better humankind.

And maybe it is that numbed sense of empathy towards the world that freed the path towards the recklessness that keeps it going. But it does work.

So the next time your thoughts make honour to the true name of your generation, close your eyes to hopelessness. Use fear as the organic fuel that will propulse you in high speed in the direction you can chose. Do what keeps you innerly alive and you will feel the weight of the wold you pull behind you, set into motion.

If everything fails and you lose the belief that you can make a change, then do it for others. This alone will let you see that your impact on one person will turn an entire universe upside down. And if everything fails, just remember : you have been born at exactly the right place in exactly the right time, and maybe that is the only why you can not yet answer...

With love ,
Your Old Narwal

P. S. : Some ASMR goodness for the short rest you might need...

The myth is the killer

Dear Narwals,

When I say that unicorns killed narwhals, I do by no means intend to instill the absoluetly epic picture of such a battle in your imagination. I do however intend to make myself clear about the very real dangers of false beliefs.

The unicorn has exerced its magic over humans for long enough to gain relevance in various domains of life. In fact, the creature´s existence and unique set of powers has not only had relevance in matters of culture and collective psyche, but as stated in various documents, was a secret ingredient to occult, alchemy and even medicine.

During the long extinct age of mouth to ear tales and enthousiastic pseudo-scientifics, long before the birth of today´s strict definition of proof, unicorns were real... at least to the believer. The cynic in me burns to shout out : "Where there is naivity, there can thrive deceit!". However you, dear reader will have understood by now : Where there is belief, there is a market for fake unicorn horns.

There was a time indeed, when money could buy a long, pale and knotted horn able to scare of spiders and cure diseases. Your snort would be shared,  by at least the genious Neil Stephenson (for fellow fans of Quicksilver), but I would like you to hold it back just for a second.

So, dark ages have been gone since a long time, the centuries brought upon humanity light an reason, mythical creatures have found their well earned rest... have I left out any other lie?
Well, long story short, the myth is as present in our market as ever, and it may even seem as if, by some turn of genius, the unicorn survived to all our revolutions under a different name.

You and I know, of course, the deceit sold to us in beautiful, shiny pots. We know the words, like magic spells, full of natural promises of health, always new and just for you and me and no one else.

Where do you hide, killer?

How could anyone get fooled by todays modern advertisement techniques? We do, at last, have the means to find and share valuable info and can even get a closer look at its source.

Do you know the answer? I mean the real one, the one that hits the core of the problem.
I am not referring to manipulation of the subconscious or to the social pressure. I am speaking about the heart of the creature we have so often called myth, corporate strategy, unicorn : the act of belief as a statement of hope.

How do you feel when a luxury brand offers you the opinion of a gorgeous, successful person on the ability of their product to erase, to perfect?.. To take the underlying worries off your shoulders and the fears out of your mind? You have been offered the easiest way out, or around, other people´s tragic destiny... be it the age spot on the forehead.

Do you care, at this point, if the freckle (no one else minds) will wanish forever, is it enough to believe in its evasion and therewith in the destruction of the proof of aging, of getting soon unable to bear children, of havin to leave the workplace, of becoming irrelevant in the eyes of society...

No one else sees all that in a brown spot on your skin, and they will not fear for your well being once having come close enough to actually notice it. That is why you will get disappointed if you expect to get surprised by a set of anti-aging products for your birthday. It is a warning sign to you only, but you are not alone making such associations, just look at the numbers.

If you are too young to worry about the process of aging, you will probably rememnber the familiar feeling of creeping panic whenever the word cellulite comes into earshot. You might be a teenager still, but even you have been informed that this "condition" is a mere foreshadow of obesity, loss of attractivity, abandonment and impending sentence of lifelong loneliness... which is particularily menacing to you, having statistically a very good life expectation.

Now, you are allowed to smirk, dear Narwal, because everybody knows how silly that all is, compared to real problems. Well, is it?

You have without any doubt heard and read about psychological and physical disorders caused by issues of body-image. It is true that one thinks more often of life threatening condtions (like eating disorders), but never about silly worries oncerning wrinkles!

Again : really? Have you already forgotten the price you were willing to pay for the serum last month? What about the painful stinge in your stomach when not fitting in old clothes? And where have you left your memories of the way you felt the last time you peeked into a magazine or compared yourself to others in any other way?

Real harm has been done, only it´s more convenient to wait until the final collapsing of psyche and body to take matters into hand.

I implore you all to address the problem as early as possible : today. You have named your enemy already, what is left to do is the battle. Kill the killer. Get out of the race for perfection, spoiler alert everyone, no one can catch it, get it, be it, it doesn´t exist, it´s an unicorn. Instead, in midst of the noise of panicked footsteps, look into the ocean and see the narwhal. It is all right there, mystery, grace, the one horn that shot through your heart like a cupid´s arrow.

The beautiful (and please notice that I mean real, profound beauty) is in front of you, in the mirror : it is you as you are right now. If you feel like you don´t have it, or at least not in your grip, it is because you did catch the creature. Now is the time to set for the hunt... but mind you, we do not look for the unicorn here, we are not going to rip out its knotted weapon to sell for a gold price. We are not hunting to make it ours, emprison it or let it become our strophy. The magic dies with the creature.

Instead, once found in our ocean, we shall befriend our narwhal, and learn. Imitate its grace and get an understanding of its joyfullness. Catch the essence of the narwhal and let the unicorn die at last, it has haunted us long enough.

Dive deep my friends,
Your Old Narwal

P. S. : Do you know what your inner narwhal has in common with all of his ocean-cousins out there? Its worst fate is imprisonment. Please boycott amusement parks which host sea mammals.

The missing ingredient to beauty?

Dear Narwals,

Whould it be weird to compare Marilyn Monroe to sea creatures? Well, consider yourself warned because here we go.

So why does the image of some people stay ingraved in our brains after a single glimpse, while others never stop being a part of the of the crowd? Obviousely, they stand out in some way.

Let´s take a look at the face of the iconic Marilyn Monroe. While you enjoy a movie, flip through a magazine or just walk down the street, how high are the chances of you seeing that image? Today, probably pretty low. If you grew up, like me, in a post-Marilyn era, you have not seen her picture more often let´s say, than the face of Beyoncé, Maryl Streep or Oprah.

And yet most of you, dear Narwals, could easily recall her every feature as you are reading along. This does, at least to me, come more instincively than the image of any of the faces of the other well-known and ridiculousely gorgeous women above.

Once you get over the initial surprise, this starts to seem quite unfair, doesn´t it? Or in other words, why her in particular, what is it that she has and others don´t?

The answer can here too be found in the magical realm of see creatures. You read right! Let´s just think about those varisous animals filling our waters with what is most beautiful. There is a reason why kids are absoluetly in love with dolfins, whaless and even sharks! Call it grace, cuteness, or strenght, they have it all. But then there are what I call World´s Outstanding Weirdos - WOWs.

The list of them goes on and on, from the ghostly pale beluga whales with those oddly shaped skulls  to young seals covered, against every probability, with fur. At the head of the category, of course, the narwhal.

Let´s just say, there is a reason why TODAY some people still think they are not real, and the explanation is huge, pointy and sticking out of their forehead. Even to seasoned narwhal lovers, those animals are a surprise each time they come into sight : the horn is just odd, it simply doesn´t fit in with the image of sea creatures. Hell, they would weird out a seehorse!


But... we also love them for this strange featrue. Every time we see it, don´t we quietly go "WOW" ? That is just about the thought Marilyn´s smilee inspires us every. single. time. Now that must mean that this beautiful creature too bares somethind strange on her face... it´s all in the beauty-mark! ( By the way, let´s just rest for a moment in thankfulness for this perfect name for such a feature.)

Call it disruption of symmetry or personnal signature, it does the same job : making her face look different. We have been surprised by it, so we remenber it, which is why we think about it more often, and we develop a connection to that face, in result we feel more towards its bearer, and here you have the secret ingredient to a love potion! Well, an attraction potion if you will...

The moral of the story is not to thrive to be the ideal (or "perfect", but I just can´t stand the word). Our aspiration should be to be the difference. Be warned, it demands from us to leave the familiar path and take full responsibility for our image. Don´t be fooled, some could find it weird! But after all, those who matter will start to see you as the surprising, the unique, the thrilling. They won´t know what hit them, there, right in the feels : admiration for your courage.
And after all, one way or the other,  you will imprint your mark on their brains, and that´s something rare.


Dive deep my friends,
Kisses from your Old Narwal

P. S. : See my Narwals? You can compare a woman to a whale and still make it a compliment!

Welcome!

Welcome everyone!

My name in Charlotte and I recently came back to blogging, call it an addiction. I would love to create a place here where I could share my opinions on topics that passionate me (nutrition, fitness, psychology, womanhood and sexuality... oh la la!).

I plan on getting you informed and interested in our all well being and send as much optimism in the world as my tiping skills will allow me!

The priority of this somewhat public wellness diary : to exchange info and thoughts with you, get the conversation flowing and most of all, learn from each other.

The unicorn of the sea!

Oh, and in case you still wonder what the title of the blog has to do with it all (apart from attracting cute marine biologist of curse), let´s just blame it all on my irrational fascination for narwhals. They are simply the ideal blend of grace, beauty, mystery and well... they are somewhat magical... I mean just look at the horn...

So dive deep my friends,

 Your Old Narwal

P. S. : Since we should all aspire to reach the level of magic those lovely creatures display, I will take the liberty to call you Narwal... because you´re (probably...) not a sea crature, but wonderful still!