I bought a Brick

Not sponsored, just addicted to my phone

As the title says, I bought a Brick. They’ve been advertising to me for years. Maybe you need a physical object to stop using your phone and picking it up all the time. This is that. You have to physically tap the box (no subscription, you just…. buy one and that’s it. Wild, I know.) and then you block access to the apps of your choosing. I did virtually no research before buying this. I just saw that Nathan Shuherk had gotten one and I thought, oh, yeah, that’s me too. Clicked add to cart. Done.

The day it came, I downloaded the app and clicked through. Would I like to have my phone bricked for some apps? it asked. Sure, I thought. That sounds great. I will get this set up and then start it tomorrow, first thing. I will stop accessing social media apps after 4 pm, but have it unbricked the rest of the time. That feels like an easy first way through. Then it just….never unbricked. Apparently I have to tap it. I am too distracted and anxious to take the thing out of the box, so I haven’t. I have five “emergency unbricks” but I’m terrified to use any of them. As a result, I haven’t been on social media except on my desktop. It’s been going great.

So if you’ve been trying to contact me on IG or Facebook, let me direct you to texting me instead. I only get an hour on desktop each day, and even then I increasingly forget to use it.

In all seriousness, my screen time is still not nothing. I am probably down to an hour or two on my phone each day. A lot of that is texting, checking email, and phantom notifications I no longer actually receive. I used to be at something around nine hours a day, though, so this is huge. Regarding the phantom notifications, they’re hard to shake. I keep thinking that I am missing something. I am: I need to use these apps like they use me, which is to say, to post my art, be strategic and plan, share the work I am making with a broader audience, but I am not there yet. So they’re all just sleeping for now. I have started looking into something like a social media scheduling tool, so I can cross-post to all the places, but I haven’t committed to anything yet. Because, of course, this is another commitment to another app.

At the studio, I’m realizing that the answer to the work lies in a few different things, including handbuilding. I am not someone who historically handbuilds. In fact, I avoid handbuilding at all costs. I tell people it takes too long, that throwing is much more efficient. Throwing is more efficient only if you can throw more than two cups at a time before your thumb gives out. Enter the slowness of handbuilding.

I think that if I take more time with it, I can start to work in this capacity. I just feel like my ceramics identity has been entirely throwing-related. So that’s a little weird.

I am doing a ton of reading—here are a few books I’ve loved recently:

The Great Wherever, a novel, narrated by a ghost, by Shannon Sanders. I loved COMPANY, her short story collection, published by Graywolf a few years ago, and this is also a Black multigenerational family saga and gorgeous and funny and weird and dark and yes please. Also it’s narrated by a ghost; need I say more? And there’s both DC and Tennessee content, so.

I just reread Erin Khar’s new book, out in winter 28 :) It was so exciting to see this one evolve from draft form to publishers marketplace announcement. You will fall in love with these characters, and her prose is so smooth and it’s so plotty in all the best ways. Look: I knew the twist because I’d read previous drafts, and I was still taken by surprise in this iteration. It’s just so, so good and propulsive and fun.

American War, by Omar El Akkad. It’s just good. There’s no way around it. Climate change novel set in what was once the US, following a second civil war and everything that followed. I somehow missed this when it came out the first time, because near future disaster novels are very much my thing, somehow, but I’m glad to read it now. Dystopian AF. The sentences are so good, though. They really get you. I also was a big fan of One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This.

Currently reading: Bora Lee Reed’s Song for Another Home, which is also great. Just came out, debut novel, and she’s a Reese’s Book Club litup fellow, so the sentences are gorgeous, obviously, and it’s narratively propulsive and beautiful and I’m really into it. It opens with a family fleeing Pyongyang in 1950, as the Korean War begins, then follows as various members of the family experience wildly differing threads of South Korean life. I love Oksoon?