I’m Tracy Au and I have a 2 year diploma in Professional Communication from MacEwan University. I am an aspiring screenwriter, so this blog is used to promote my writing and attract people who will hire me to write for your TV show or movie.
I post a lot of articles about jobs, entertainment (TV, movies, books), news, and my opinions on it. I also write about my daily life. I have another blog promoting my TV project at www.thevertexfighter.blogspot.com.
Sunday, August 4, 2019
"Clutter or collection?"/ The Gold Leaf/ "Tidiness guru targets new audience"
Jan. 6, 2017 "Clutter or collection?": Today I found this article by Joanne Richard in the Edmonton Journal:
It’s OK to embrace our treasures, expert says
The good:
Don’t kill the clutter. Love the stuff you’re with!
Well, you don’t hear that very often. While decluttering messages bombard us, making us feel guilty and like failures, Dr. Christina Waters, PhD, is espousing a different message:
Don’t be guilt-tripped into trashing beloved, if non-utilitarian, items.
“Embrace the fact that by living, working, making choices, you will create a body of objects, mementoes, and other byproducts of being alive and active. Let these accumulated accessories linger and work for you as much as they can,” says Waters, author of Inside the Flame: The Joy of Treasuring What You Already Have.
“Keeping a wealth of items in your life — objects, treasures, old souvenirs, beautiful nothings, memorabilia, tiny love notes, childhood toys, seashells, polished rocks — is proof of your unique identity,” says Waters. “Cherishing important clutter is a way of nurturing your own story.”
Clutter, or more accurately, accumulation, can be crucial in terms of sparking creativity, she says.
Those little notes around the computer, or the stack of magazines on the end table can provide visual prompts for our next project.
She’s not talking about stuff that is mindlessly accumulated, but rather mindfully collected and loved. Waters says that keeping a collection of treasured objects, such as family heirlooms, or handmade tchotchkes, is a way of honouring our own taste, our own history.
Ditch the mindset which seems to be all about searching for a socially accepted, one-size-fits-all living space, rather than choosing to cherish the workplace and living areas you’ve created, she says.
Living in a stripped down, zero clutter living space can equal emotional emptiness.
Sure it helps us start anew and clean our living space, she says, but “at worst, it creates a generic nowhere. Zero clutter means zero creativity. The space that is sterile is no longer an individual, unique space. It could be anywhere. It could belong to anyone.”
Zero clutter equals zero inspiration.
You might be fine staying overnight in a chain motel room, she says, but you wouldn’t want to live for very long in a room that is cookie-cutter bland. The eyes and mind need inspiration.
“The treasured collections we may have built up over the years, those notes and books clustered around our work space, these are healthy clutter, in the sense of being able to stimulate new ideas and inspire creativity.”
The bad:
Clutter is killing you!
So says Dr. Clifford Lazarus, adding that it actually keeps you in a state of chronic stress.
All the visual chaos — boxes, bags and plastic containers of junk — may seem harmless, but the disarray, disorganization and mess takes its toll, including on everyone around you, says Lazarus, a blogger with psychologytoday.com.
“I have seen basically good marriages implode under the emotionally crushing weight of unmanageable amounts of unnecessary stuff,” he says.
Lazarus, of thelazarusinstitute.com, adds that when people are in aesthetically pleasing, organized and uncluttered surroundings, they feel more relaxed, at peace and calmer.
According to neuroscientists at Princeton University, physical clutter vies for your attention, resulting in poor performance and increased stress.
But giving up stuff is hard to do. Researchers at Yale recently discovered that the two areas in your brain associated with pain actually light up in response to getting rid of possessions you value.
Also, the more you touch an object, the greater the value you assign to it.
In another study, by Brother International, desk clutter has workers spending 76 hours a year — that’s almost two weeks — hunting for misplaced files, staples or documents.
The tips:
Your stuff is yours; it’s unique. Keep the clutter healthy, with these tips from Dr. Christina Waters:
Gathering items you love and giving them their own place — a shelf, a corner, or tiny windowsill — allows them to be part of your everyday activities. They can be seen and are available for you to touch, to pick up and hold, to trigger memories and special moments that define our identities.
Curate your collections. Group them playfully — by colour, by shape, by nothing in particular.
Rotate these collections. In the summer, bring out some of the items from a beach vacation. In winter, something from a ski trip, family gathering, etc.
Touch these items. Connect with them physically.
Name your plants, reorganize your memorabilia. This will keep you in touch with them.
The piles of mail! The tower of books in the corner! The tchotchkes crowding every surface! If this sounds like your home, you're not alone. (These are signs your house is stressing you out.) The first step to being truly happy in your space is to figure out what to keep—and what to let go.
'A cluttered room is much more likely to produce, and contribute to, a cluttered mind,' says professional organizer Marie Kondo, creator of the KonMari method and author of the bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
'I believe that only in an uncluttered room, which enables an uncluttered mind, can you truly focus your attention and your energy on the matters in your life which are preventing you from reaching your truest happiness.' According to design psychologist Sally Augustin, PhD, the powerful mental effects of clutter have roots in our evolution.
'In our early days as a species, our lives depended on continually surveying the environment and seeing if anything was coming that was going to eat us,' she says. 'Today we continue to survey our environment, and too many things makes this subconscious reviewing more difficult, which is why the visual complexity of clutter is so stressful.' A study from Princeton University shows that too much disorganized stimuli simply overwhelms the brain.
Jun. 3, 2017 Children's books: Today I found this article by Anna Fitzpatrick in the Globe and Mail:
The Gold Leaf
By Kirsten Hall and Matthew Forsythe
Enchanted Lion Books, 48 pages, $25.95
Spring arrives in the forest and the trees bloom in lush shades of green. The attentions of the animals become focused on one particular leaf that glistens in gold quite literally on the page. Shimmery foil is an effective gimmick that made a generation of kids fall in love with Marcus Pfister’s The RainbowFish, despite the overwhelming schmaltz of that book.
Here, the effect is used much more sparingly, with elegant results. As explained in the author’s note, gold leafing is “an art form invented by the Egyptians three millennia ago,” in which gold is pounded into sheets “as thin as butterfly wings.”
The creatures of the forest fight over the mysterious gold leaf and, again as in Rainbow Fish, there is a lesson to be had about the dangers of greed. But whereas that book ended with the other fish forcing Rainbow Fish to mutilate himself so that everyone could have one of his glittery scales (seriously, go back and reread it, it’s a messed up book), in The Gold Leaf the animals learn that they don’t need to possess the leaf in order to enjoy it. Nature, after all, is not about consumption, but appreciation.
My opinion: I'm going to put that line into my inspirational quotes: The Gold Leaf the animals learn that they don’t need to possess the leaf in order to enjoy it.
Sept. 28, 2017 "Tidiness guru targets new audience":
Today I found this article by Katherine Roth in the Edmonton Journal:
Just when it seemed Marie Kondo had spread her gospel on the “lifechanging magic” of decluttering as far is it could go, the author — whose two previous books remain international bestsellers — is back with a different audience in mind.
Kondo’s message that you should keep only things that “spark joy” is now in manga form, with a love story as a backdrop. Her new book, The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up (Ten Speed Press), features the work of artist Yuko Uramoto and seems designed to attract a younger set — including teenage boys — many of whom probably missed out on her earlier volumes. And she may be on target. While my two sons, ages 12 and 14, had zero interest in her earlier books, they battled over who could rip through Kondo’s manga as soon as they spotted it on the dining room table. And while they rolled their eyes when I asked if it had made a difference in their lives, my younger son was soon putting his desk in order and going through his drawers, and my older son packed for a family trip by carefully rolling his clothes into neat little packets in his suitcase. He also commented on a recently acquired cabinet in our living room, noting Kondo’s advice that additional storage furniture should be unnecessary in a properly decluttered home.
Then my boys passed the book on to a friend, who also rolled his eyes and shrugged when asked if he’d learned anything from it. But within days, he’d packed up no less than seven bags of unwanted toys and clothes from his room. A coincidence? Perhaps. Manga is a form of graphic novel in Kondo’s native Japan. “In Japan, manga is a form of artistic expression and entertainment that connects people across generations,” Kondo wrote in an email when asked about the book.
“Creating the manga has been such a fun and gratifying experience for me, and I hope that it sparks joy for new readers and fans alike!”
The fictional story tells of Chiaki Suzuki, 29, single, and living in a tiny hoarders’ den of a Tokyo apartment. She develops a crush on the handsome — and minimalist — young man next door, a professional cook whom she can’t bring herself to invite over because of her messy apartment.
The two meet when he complains about the mountains of trash on her balcony.
Chiaki is a workaholic and never has time to cook, but she dreams of preparing delicious meals at home. Will she ever be able to tidy up enough to invite her Prince Charming to dinner?
Thanks to Kondo, who appears as a character in the book — a sort of magical decluttering fairy — the answer is yes.
Kondo, teaching her method of sifting through belongings one category at a time, helps Chiaki transform her apartment and, in the process, her life. Chiaki learns to appreciate the things around her, recognize her forgotten dreams and value herself.
In short, she discovers the lifechanging magic of tidying up.
And yes, she does end up with the cute guy next door, a role model for any reader, of any age, who ever doubted that cooking and tidying up was a certain way to a girl’s heart.
Jul. 28, 2019: I forwarded the above to my Edmonton Declutter and Organize Meetup. I have attended 2 of those meetings. Paper management: When I watch a TV show pilot or movie, I write on scrap paper. I noticed that I write on a lot of paper so I'm typing it up on my blog. Then I can recycle it and that's decluttering. Instead of watching a new movie, let's write about an old movie that I already saw. My week: Sat. Jul. 27, 2019 Man invents a new surgery and cures himself: Doug Lindsay had this disease where he was bedridden and could hardly walk. He did his own research and thought he was pumping too much adrenaline. Then they created a surgery to fix his adrenaline.
Lindsay soon decided he needed a partner -- not just a physician but a scientist curious enough to take on a rare case and spend long hours with him parsing it out.
The best place to find that person, he reasoned, was at the American Autonomic Society's annual conference, attended by scientists from around the world who focused on nervous system disorders.
In 2002, he give a presentationabout his disease at the group's meeting in Hilton Head, South Carolina. To get there, Lindsay bought a row of airline tickets so that, with the help of friends, he could lay across several seats during the flight.
The Amazing Spiderman: I finally saw this 2012 movie. I saw the 3 movies with Tobey Maguire and I liked it. I saw the first one the theatres in 2002 with my friend Leslie. That movie was so good, it was still playing in the theatres (and not $1 theatres) because a lot of people liked it. The other 2 movies I borrowed from the library. I saw this on my DVR. I usually watch movies on TV. It was a good and solid movie. I do like Andrew Garfield as Spiderman. Sun. Jul. 28, 2019: This weekend I have off, so I'm writing a lot of TV show and movie reviews so it feels like I'm re-watching it. This week I will be busy. Finance: Last week, my parents and I went to the bank and was there for 1hr and 15 min talking and buying investments. If you have money in a savings account, it gets 15 cents interest a yr. You need to invest to grow your money. Banking and finances was kind of boring, but you have to do it. If not now, when? The Simpsons: As usual, I have to quote from this show. There was an episode where Homer and Bart were selling grease to make money. Homer: I'm trying to achieve financial independence. Marge: Though cans of grease? Homer: No, through savings and wise investments. Of course, through grease! Centre of Spiritual Living events: Fri. Aug. 9, 2019: Potluck and Family Game night. Fri. Aug. 16 and Sat. Aug. 17: Getting to Know You and Community Garage sale. If you want to sell or buy anything, you can go there. www.centreforspirit.com/events My opinion: As a kid and teen, I like going to garage sales. I like to look at people's stuff and shopping. Now I'm mildly interested. Superhero TV shows and movies: I was talking to Ni who works at my 2nd restaurant job. She's in her 20s. She has watched all those Marvel movies. I'm writing about those movie reviews right now. They're good and all, but I only watch 1 or 2 of them a year on TV. Writer's block: I wrote 7 TV show and movie reviews, and I'm still not making any creative writing. My intention was to have fun by writing these reviews. I did have fun. Friends: I called my friend Colette and we talked about movies. It was about 10 min because she was driving. (Hands- free phone). She watched Mary Poppins Returns and liked it. I never seen that or the original. My birthday Aug. 11: I forgot what I did on my last birthday. Then I checked my blog. I worked at my 2nd restaurant job and I sat outside and read the newspaper.
Friends: I went to work in the morning at my 2nd restaurant job. I told Ni.
Tracy: I was on your Facebook page, and you know J. I met him last month when I was working at the bar.
Ni: Yeah, we worked at a this bar together.
We then talked about Marvel movies, because I wrote a lot of reviews.
I then went to work in the evening at my 1st restaurant job. I talked to that new cook K about Marvel movies too. Wed. Jul. 31, 2019 "American Idol Antonella Barba pleads guilty, faces 10 years to life":Here is some crazy news:
Antonella Barba, formerly of "American Idol" and "Fear Factor" fame, likely will spend at least a decade behind bars after pleading guilty to possession of at least 400 grams of fentanyl with intent to distribute in federal court in Virginia on Tuesday.
The guilty plea carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison, according to a plea agreement filed in federal court. She could face a possible life sentence and up to $10 million in fines, as well as asset forfeiture, according to the agreement.
The 32-year-old singer, who grew up on the Jersey Shore, was first arrested on Duke Street in Norfolk in October 2018. She originally was charged with selling or intending to sell 100 grams or more of heroin, according to Virginia court records. She denied the initial charges.
On Wednesday morning, Edmonton physician Bob Turner, also a former NDP MLA for Edmonton-Whitemud, announced his $150,000 donation to Boyle Street Community Services’ winter warming bus over the next three years.
November through April, the 18-seat vehicle wraps around the city seven days a week to deliver aid and offer a point of contact for housing and social services to residents in need — those who live outside the core, where most agencies are concentrated.
An oncologist with the Cross Cancer Institute and University of Alberta Hospital, Turner said his encounters with patients who rely on the inner-city agency drove home the importance of services like the warming bus.
Aug. 2, 2019 Timmy and Sean O' Neill: I was watching the Katie Couric show in Aug. 2014. It originally aired May 2014.
Sean was paralyzed from his legs, and climbed mountains. He was unsure about climbing Devil's Tower in 1996. Sean was pulling himself up with ropes. They were daredevils. They climbed Mount Washington and it was 3000 feet high. Aug. 3, 2019: My birthday is coming up, and the only thing I want is the Globe and Mail newspaper. The Sat. section is like $4.50 and I will be reading it for hours. Then I will give it to my brother and dad to read.
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