The Brain Station, Part Two
Continuing An Essay of the Mind: Antonio’s Desk and Sensory Envelope
by: A.Z.K.R.
After I made my post about The Brain Station and Italian Conductors, I kept thinking about how these concepts could apply to other parts of my memory, and it brought up more things worth blogging about, namely, Sensory Envelopes, Rotten Bananas, and Bad Brain Weather.
The Sensory Envelopes have to do a little more with short term memory than the trains do, but it isn’t an exact science, there are just different nuances.
We as living beings are processing information twenty-four seven, and I picture this process like a little man sitting at his desk surrounded by mail chutes. I didn’t think it fair to blame all of our memory shortcomings on the Italian Conductor, so I decided that the sensory boy is Antonio, the Conductor’s younger cousin.
Antonio sits at his desk in a swivel chair sorting information as it comes. I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of his organization, but I know there is a garbage chute, a wastepaper basket and those plastic sorting office drawers all around his desk.
When sorting, Antonio has to make a ‘forget later’ pile and a ‘remember later’ pile. As an example for how these work- you see hundreds, maybe even thousands, of faces a day, and he to decide which ones are worth storing, and which ones go to the rubbish heap the Dream Team dumpster dives in. Chances are, you don’t forget a face the moment you turn away, or what an isle of the grocery store looks like as soon as you leave it, he lets those pictures sit in a pile until he’s certain you won’t need it. This process of tossing things on his desk is why “retracing your steps” is such an effective tool. It forces Antonio into the specific action of picking up each envelope he’s set down in a stack until he gets to the one you’re trying to remember, like the Where I Left My Keys’ envelope.
It really helps Antonio when you set reminders for yourself because it sends the same envelope to him several time. If one gets buried, misplaced, tossed down the wrong shoot, etc. no biggie, he has a spare. But this only helps if its pointed. The reminders you set are little pink sticky notes Antonio puts above his desk, and sticky notes fall down, so you have to replace them, but the important part is that Antonio stops to handwrite the sticky note and put it up, otherwise you create repetitive visual sensory envelopes, which aren’t helpful in the least and can be bad. If you put a to-do list on your bedroom door, but you don’t put up a mental sticky note to look at it every time you wake up, or pass by, it becomes ignorable junk mail that he throws away every time he gets it. You walk into your room and it’s messy. A ‘Your Room Is A Disgrace’ envelope comes in. Antonio gets irritated and tosses it because you haven’t told him what to do about it. Unless you stop to look at your hamper in the hall and say, “I need to do laundry today” thus making a sticky note, Antonio just gets a ‘The Hamper Is Mount Va-Dirty Clothes’ envelope and junks it. He has five of those already.
Breaking down the big mess into small tasks is another way to help Antonio, because instead of just giving the exasperated little Italian boy another ‘Your Room Is messy’ envelope, you can attach a little note that say, ‘start by clearing the floor’ (the more specific the better.) He sighs in relief. He knows what to do with that.
Antonio is not to blame for mistakes. He’s just a little guy; he needs your active participation to do his job well.
Now there are two ways Antonio deals with his desk. At night while you sleep he either sits down and carefully sorts through what you might still need tomorrow and what’s a waste of space, —or— he panics when his desk gets too crowded and swipes everything off of it onto his workspace floor at a random date. I fully believe he does both interchangeably.
Remember that if you’re tired, Antonio is really tired, and if he’s staying up later than you to sort envelopes, he’s bound to make mistakes, miss sort and might doze off or forget things you actually still needed. He has bags under his eyes and drool cascading from the corner of his mouth. We have to take care of him and help him maintain his space as opposed to manic stress sensory overload purging. Writing things down is one way of alleviating little Antonio from remembering everything for us. And if you later remember something you had forgot, pat little Antonio on the head because that means he didn’t throw it out. It was just misplaced somewhere around his desk.
Antonio’s desk is also a helpful visual for distractions, fixations and daydreaming.
When you suddenly have a though that makes it reeeeeeally hard to focus (the word for that is extremely), it’s when Antonio suddenly has a very special envelope on his desk distracting him from sorting anything else. This envelope might be shinier than the others. It has colorful stickers, and beautiful, intriguing calligraphy. He doesn’t want to look at the mundane ‘Your Math Book Is in Front of You’ envelope. The ‘Mom Is Talking Now’ envelope…Oh, Ooops. Antonio didn’t turn on his ‘Outside World to Inside World’ intercom. When something is gnawing at you, whether it be excitement of some kind, nervousness, anticipation, etc. like an email from someone important, Antonio feels it too, and he’s trying not to look at the envelope that’s different from the others.
Creating blocks of time and restraints that you can stick to is the best way to help yourself and Antonio. It’s getting Antonio to put that shiny, or scary envelope in a drawer of his plastic sorting bin for later, so that he doesn’t have to look at it, and can focus clearer.
Antonio is not an excuse for your problems’, he’s a tool for helping you understand them, because every sight, sound, smell, texture, emotion and random thought you have, is an envelope on his desk.
(The Rotten Bananas and Bad Brain Weather will be discussed in later posts.)
Timothy and the Dragon Defenders, Part Two
A Short Story from the Archives of A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
[To read Timothy’s adventure from the beginning, click here.]
The purple dragon roared fiercely. A river rushed behind it, the sun made the water glisten, peeking over what almost looked like pines. The sudden brightness pierced Timothy’s eyes and all his senses were overwhelmed at once. He was grateful for the warmth, but the sun beat down harshly on his skin.
“Good thing the basement wasn’t a wardrobe and this place isn’t Narnia,” Timothy said to the dragon. “I’d be freezing and I’ve no time for tea with Mr. Tumnus, I have a test tomorrow.”
The dragon roared. And burped. Bits of Mrs. McCracken’s jelly still lingered on the corners of its mouth.
“So you are?” Timothy asked.
The dragon burped again.
“Ok, then. I’ll call you Burp.”
The dragon shook his head no.
“Belch?”
It shook its head again, then fluttered its wings. The right wing featured a brand, or tattoo, and when they came to rest against the beast’s back again, Timothy saw the name, “Galen” etched into the dragon’s flesh.
“Galen?”
The dragon danced, a bit like the McCracken’s golden retriever puppy when someone dropped bacon on the breakfast room floor.
“Like the Greek physician?”
The dragon danced again.
“So where are we, Galen?”
Galen belched another round, evicting all the glass from the crunched Mason jars into the river as he did.
“Ew.”
The dragon seemed to shrug and began walking away.
“Hey, wait!” Timothy followed. Pebbles from the riverside massaged his bare feet, not so unpleasantly. “Seriously, wait!”
He caught up to the bumbling dragon, “So where are we, anyway?”
Galen burped, then stopped abruptly, and Timothy bumped into a tree to avoid running into him.
Timothy and the Dragon Defenders, Part One
A Short Story from the Archives of A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
Timothy McCracken was having a hard time. He was supposed to be sleeping, but instead of counting sheep, he was counting the taps he heard coming from the basement across the hall. Timothy’s bedroom was downstairs near the kitchen, apart from his siblings and parents who slept on the second story of the house. This suited him fine because it meant he didn’t share a room with his brother Dean, who snored like a freight train. It was also great when he wanted peanut butter sandwiches at midnight, but not so much when the dog whined at the rustling noises coming from the basement.
What was down there besides Mom’s canning jars and Christmas decorations? Did the house have mice? Were ghosts walking around in old shoes discarded in the donate bin? One could never tell after the sun went down and the moon cast shadows through the window.
He pulled his feet from under under his flannel sheets, his yellow gym shorts reflected neon stripes from the moonlight. As soon as his feet hit the cool, wooden floors, he heard a crash from below. Instinctively, he rushed to the sound, accustomed to rescuing younger siblings from their messes and broken things. The crashing of his mother’s preserve jars rang in his ears as he crossed the hall to the basement and took the stairs two at a time. He stopped abruptly at the last step, worried his bare feet might catch glass.
Curling his toes around the edge of the landing, he paused a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. As he stood there, the scent of cinnamon and peaches wafted against his nose, goosebumps pimpled his arms from the cold, but a breath of hot air pressed against his forehead.
“What?”
Slowly, his pupils caught up to the rest of his body and revealed large nostrils flaring in front of him. Purple scales pulsed as the warmth puffed against Timothy’s face. The beast turned and scurried behind the shelves of Mrs. McCracken’s jars, tongue lapping three of them in one gulp, glass and all. TImothy heard a belch and caught a whiff of strawberry currant jam.
“You like Mom’s jam?” he asked the beast, stepping closer. Surely it was safe to follow it, this must be a dream. After all, dragons aren’t real.
In a flash of light, the creature was nearly gone, a tail slithering out a door Timothy had never seen before. The door was heavy and wooden, thicker and shorter than any other in the house. The knob was made of tarnished silver. A bit of light glowed from behind the door–enough so Timothy could see that the knob was spherical and engraved to look like a globe, but with land masses he did not recognize.
As he reached for the knob, heat radiated from behind the threshold and in an instant, Timothy was no longer in his Mom’s basement.
[Come back next week to see where Timothy has found himself!]
Totalitarian Caste Systems in Dystopian Fantasy
A Guest Blog Post by: A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
Totalitarianism is a system of government that is headed by an absolute dictator who supports themselves with some kind of violent force. In a totalitarian country there is no freedom of the people. One example of totalitarianism can be found in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. The Final Empire is headed by the Lord Ruler, who uses emotional manipulation against the populous. They are required to believe only what the Steel Ministry tells them and treat the Lord Ruler as god. The Final Empire is also a caste system. A caste system is a system of government in which people are divided into sections based on race and or job description. The Final Empire is not an exact Caste System sine the Garrison and a few merchants come from the Skaa population.
A better example of a Totalitarian Caste System is Suzanne Collins’s series Hunger Games. In Hunger Games President Snow represents the the absolute ruler and the Hunger Games themselves serve as the violent force. The caste system in Panam is much stricter than the one in the Final Empire. The people are confined to geographically separated districts that are each in charge of one resource that is distributed across the whole country, such as coal lumber, and technology. District Thirteen is the rebel district, their Mistborn counterparts would be the thieving crews. In both dystopian societies the government mostly ignored the rebels, avoiding conflict and keeping the peace. Up until the nineteen forties India was a real life example of a totalitarian caste system. The noblemen and Garrison plus the District two and the capital are equal to the Kshatriyas. Likewise the Chandles are similar to the thieving crews or district thirteen.
Totalitarian caste systems are terrible for everyone except the people on top. Even now as a democracy India is a miserable place still scarred by its past government. On the flip side, the opposite of a totalitarian caste system would be a world with no ruler or government system at all. You may note that in the United States religious freedom only goes as far as it can without infringing on other peoples’ rights. Or it was supposed to anyway. Both extremes are bad. People need guidance, not total dominance. Rules, not oppression.
Anakalian Whims 