advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
My Son's Skin Taught Me To Read The Weather Like A Sailor. AI-Generated.
The boy who could not sit in the sun My son Finn arrived pale as milk and stayed that way. His older sister tans like her mother, an easy golden brown by December, but Finn inherited some quiet ancestral genetics from my side, the side that came from grey northern places, and the Australian sun treated his skin like an insult it wanted to answer immediately.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
I Went For The Dark Sky And The Elephants Ambushed Me. AI-Generated.
A man who looks up I have been an amateur astronomer for most of my adult life, which is a polite way of saying I have spent thirty years driving away from cities in the middle of the night to look at things that were already there. I am not a scientist. I am an accountant, actually, with a small refractor telescope and a folding chair and a thermos, and a deep, slightly obsessive love of a truly dark sky.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Chipped Tooth That Nearly Ended My Playing. AI-Generated.
A embouchure is a fragile thing Most people think a brass player plays with their lungs. We do not, not really. We play with a tiny, ridiculous, deeply personal arrangement of lips, teeth and muscle called the embouchure, and it takes years to build and about a second to ruin. I have played the trumpet since I was eleven. I am fifty-two now. For most of those years I have earned my living teaching it, in a rented studio in Sandton with terrible parking and a piano that is always slightly flat, and I have never once taken my front teeth for granted, because my front teeth are where the sound begins.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
My Grandfather's Bakkie Sat Under A Lemon Tree For Six Years. AI-Generated.
The bakkie and the man My grandfather drove the same white bakkie for as long as I was alive. It was a battered old thing, older than me, and it smelled of pipe tobacco and Sunlight soap and the particular dust of the small Free State town where he farmed a few hectares of not very much. He was not a wealthy man. He was a careful one. The bakkie was how he fetched feed, took vegetables to the co-op, ferried me to school when my mother could not, and drove himself, slowly and with great dignity, to church every Sunday in a jacket that no longer quite fit.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Sea Told Me Where To Live Before The Estate Agent Did. AI-Generated.
A swimmer who forgot how to float I swam competitively from the age of nine, and then I coached swimming, and then I ran a small learn-to-swim school in a suburb of Johannesburg for twenty-six years. Water was my whole working life, which is a strange thing to say about a city that sits on a high, dry plateau a thousand kilometres from the nearest coast. I taught toddlers to blow bubbles and I taught nervous grandmothers to put their faces in, and every night I dreamed, genuinely dreamed, of the sea.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Coin Mr Olivier Pressed Into My Palm After My Last School Match. AI-Generated.
The last board on a Friday afternoon I learned to concentrate in a church hall in Krugersdorp that always smelled of floor polish and orange squash. That is where the chess club met, every Friday from two until half past five, and where a retired railway clerk named Mr Olivier taught roughly forty children a year how to lose without crying and win without gloating.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
