advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Flat in Sandringham Where I Learned to Cook for One. AI-Generated.
The Morning the House Was Not Mine Anymore I moved out on a Tuesday because Tuesdays felt like nobody was watching. Erin took the couch, the good knives, and the dog, which was fair, because the dog had always been hers first and had only ever tolerated me. I took my clothes, a box of books, the kettle, and a strange, floating feeling that I had misplaced my own life somewhere between the lounge and the front gate. We had not shouted. That was the worst part. Seven years just quietly ran out of road, and one of us had to be the one to say it out loud.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
My Knees Retired Before I Did, So I Built Some Heat Into the House. AI-Generated.
The Body That Stopped Doing What I Asked For twenty years I was a runner. Not a fast one, not a competitive one, just a man who laced up before dawn and put in the kilometres because the world made more sense to me afterward. Cape Town gave me a lifetime of routes, the promenade at Sea Point when the wind allowed, the trails up on the mountain when it did not. Running was not exercise for me. It was how I thought, how I grieved when my father died, how I stayed married through two hard years I do not talk about much. My legs carried a lot more than my weight.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
Our First Place Together Was a Small Flat in Germiston. AI-Generated.
Two Kids Pretending to Be Adults We got married younger than most of our friends thought was sensible, Lerato and I, and we did it on almost nothing. The wedding was small, the honeymoon was two nights up the road, and the day after we came back we sat on her mother's spare bed, where we had been staying, and admitted to each other that we had no idea how to actually be married adults with our own front door. We both had jobs, brand new ones, mine at a logistics company and hers as a junior in an accounting firm, and between our two starting salaries we had exactly enough courage to try and exactly enough fear to make it interesting.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
My Camera Bag Lives in the Boot and My Phone Runs the Whole Day. AI-Generated.
The boot is my office People imagine my job as the ten minutes where I lift a camera and a bride laughs at something her father says. That part is real, and I love it, but it is maybe two percent of the week. The rest is driving. My camera bag lives in the boot of my car, wedged against a cooler box and a folding reflector that has never once folded the way the instructions promised, and I spend more hours behind a steering wheel than behind a lens. I shoot weddings and portraits, mostly around KwaZulu-Natal, sometimes up into the Free State when a couple has a farm in the family, and I go where the work is because a solo business cannot afford to be picky about postcodes.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
My Son Got Into University Four Hundred Kilometres Away. AI-Generated.
The letter that changed the kitchen The morning the acceptance came, I was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in my hand, stirring pap for breakfast, and my son Tebogo came running down the passage in his socks, sliding the last two metres the way he used to when he was seven. He pushed the phone into my face so close I could not read a single word. I had to take it from him and hold it at arm's length, and even then my eyes were doing something strange, the letters swimming, because I already knew from his face what it said. He was in. First in our whole family. First cousin, first nephew, first grandchild, the first Maleka to be offered a place at a real university in a real city, and that city was four hundred kilometres away from our kitchen in Polokwane.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Festive Rush That Buried My Little Nursery in Paper. AI-Generated.
The place and the way I ran it My nursery sits on a dusty stretch of road on the northern edge of Pretoria, where the tar gives way to gravel and the veld starts pushing back against the town. I have been here for nineteen years. I dug the first beds myself, hauled the first bags of compost off the back of a borrowed bakkie, and planted a row of syringa saplings that are now taller than the shade cloth. People know me by name. They come for their spekboom and their aloes, their tomato seedlings in spring, their poinsettias and their potted conifers when the year turns toward the festive season.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Maternity Leave That Nearly Broke Us Before the Baby Came. AI-Generated.
The line on the test I found out I was pregnant in a small bathroom in Mthatha with the door locked, because my sister was in the house and I did not want to say anything yet. I stared at the two lines for a long time. I was happy. I want to be honest and say I was happy first, before everything else came in. My husband Sipho and I had been trying quietly for over a year, and there it was, plain as day, a second line that would change our whole lives.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Campaign I Built for a Rhino Called Two-Notch. AI-Generated.
I only put my hand up because nobody else did I want to be honest from the first sentence. I never meant to run anything. I signed up to help at a reserve outside Hoedspruit because my sister nagged me into it, and because my flat in Nelspruit had started to feel like a waiting room for a life I was not living. I imagined I would fill water troughs, maybe hand out lanyards at a fundraiser, and go home feeling slightly better about myself. That was the whole plan.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Empty Unit I Turned Into a Gym for Kids Who Had Nowhere to Go. AI-Generated.
Forty years of sparks and a quiet house My name is Ray, and for forty one years I welded for a living. Structural stuff mostly, beams and rail and the kind of joints nobody sees but everybody trusts. My hands still do a thing in the cold, a stiffness that comes from decades of holding a torch steady when my shoulders wanted to quit. I am not complaining. That work fed my family and it gave me a back that aches with a purpose. But when I finally hung up the hood, the house went very quiet. My wife had passed two winters before. The kids were grown and gone to other states. I would sit at the kitchen table with a coffee going cold and I would listen to the clock, and I will be honest with you, that clock started to feel like an enemy.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Saturday My Daughter's Tooth Cost More Than My Bank Balance. AI-Generated.
The morning started like any other job day I am a plumber. Have been for nineteen years, twelve of them working for myself out of a white VW Polo with a cracked wing mirror and a boot that smells permanently of pipe dope and old rags. That car is not a nice thing. The paint has gone chalky on the bonnet from standing in the Durban sun, and there is a dent on the back door from a trolley at the Builders Warehouse in Pinetown. But it is mine, fully paid off, and it is the reason my family eats. Every geyser I replace, every blocked drain I rod, every leaking Isolating valve I swap out, I get there in that Polo with my tools rattling in the back.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Long Road to Nelspruit and the Daughter Who Made Me Take It. AI-Generated.
The morning I finally reversed out of the yard I have driven the road out of our little town so many times that I know where the tar dips and where the potholes have started chewing at the edges. I know the spot where the mist sits in the low ground past the last farm gate, and the exact bend where the guineafowl always cross as if they own the whole province. But on this particular Tuesday, the road felt longer than usual, because for the first time in years I was not driving toward a school, or a funeral, or the co-op to buy feed for my sister. I was driving toward a waiting room in Nelspruit, and I had my daughter's voice in my head the whole way there.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Morning I Stopped Apologising for Being There. AI-Generated.
The first alarm I ever set on purpose I was twenty-three when I started clocking in at a mill that turned raw oats into the muesli and porridge that ended up in supermarket boxes. My alarm went off at 04:10 and I would lie there for a full minute hating it, then get up because the shift did not care how I felt. The plant sat on the edge of a small industrial belt outside town, all corrugated roofing and yellow floor paint gone chalky from years of feet. I remember the first week mostly as a smell. Warm cereal dust, faintly sweet, a bit like the inside of a biscuit tin, and under it the machine smell of grease and hot metal. It got into my hair. My mother said I came home smelling like breakfast, and she meant it kindly, but I took it as proof that I did not yet belong.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
