advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
We Sold the House With the Big Garden and Nobody Cried, Which Surprised Us Both. AI-Generated.
The lawn was the last straw, honestly People assume it was something dramatic. A health scare, a burst pipe, a fight with the neighbours. It was the lawn. Specifically it was a Sunday in early spring when I was on my knees pulling a length of kikuyu out of the flowerbed, and my back went in that quiet, treacherous way it does now, and I lay on the grass looking at the sky and thought, with total clarity, I do not want to do this for the rest of my life.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Storage Unit I Kept Paying For Long After Everyone Told Me To Let It Go. AI-Generated.
The debit order I never cancelled There is a debit order that has left my account on the third of every month for four years. Six hundred and something rand, going to a storage place off the R21 near Benoni. My daughter found it once when she was helping me sort out my banking on the phone, and she looked at me the way you look at a person who has left the tap running in another room.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
I Moved for a Job and Ended Up Buying My First Home by Accident. AI-Generated.
I am a Joburg boy through and through. Born in the East Rand, schooled there, first job there, first heartbreak there. I used to be one of those people who rolled their eyes at everyone who moved to Cape Town and would not shut up about the mountain. I found them insufferable. And then, at thirty four, I became one of them, and now I am the person at the braai talking about the mountain, and I have made my peace with the hypocrisy.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
My Uncle Left Me Shares in Nine Countries and a Puzzle He Never Solved. AI-Generated.
My uncle Gerald was the sort of man who read the financial pages the way other people read the sports results. He never married, never had children, and spent fifty years quietly buying small parcels of shares in companies all over the world. When he died, he left the whole strange collection to me, his nephew, a retired music teacher who could barely tell a bond from a bassoon.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Passage Light I Could Finally Leave On As Long As I Wanted. AI-Generated.
For three years I shared. First with two girls I met through a friend of a friend, then with a rotating cast of strangers as people moved out and new ones moved in. I am twenty six, I work at a call centre in the middle of Johannesburg as a team leader, and for those three years I lived my whole life in one bedroom of somebody else's arrangement, tiptoeing around a house that was never quite mine.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Borehole We Were So Proud Of Was Quietly Making Us Ill. AI-Generated.
We bought the smallholding four years ago with a head full of romance and very little practical knowledge. Two hectares, a tired old farmhouse, a stand of gum trees, and, most exciting of all, our very own borehole. City people that we were, the borehole felt like the height of self sufficiency. Our own water, out of our own ground, needing nobody's permission and nobody's monthly bill.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
Forty Litres of Bunny Chow Batter and No Cash to Buy the Flour. AI-Generated.
The booking came in on a Monday and it was the kind of thing I had been praying for since I started the stall. A big food and music weekend on the edge of town wanted me there, all three days, and they wanted me to cater a hospitality area on top of my normal stall. It was more work than I had ever taken on. It was also more money than I had ever been offered at once, and I said yes before I had even worked out how I would do it.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Map My Daughter Drew of a Garden We Did Not Have Yet. AI-Generated.
For nearly two years we lived in a townhouse in Bellville with a wall we shared with a young couple who liked their music the way I like my coffee, which is to say strong and late at night. I am not writing this to complain about them. They were kind people. But there is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from living pressed up against strangers, and by the end of it I was carrying that tiredness everywhere I went.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Chains I Wore in 1997, and the Registration Fee I Could Not Cover. AI-Generated.
When I was twenty three I wore more gold than sense. This was the late nineties, in Durban, and I was a young man with my first real pay packet and a firm belief that a chain around your neck told the world you had arrived. I bought a rope chain first. Then a heavier one. Then a bracelet to match, and a ring with a flat face that I thought made me look like somebody in a music video.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Doctor Told Me to Do Nothing, So I Booked the Hardest Nothing I Could Find. AI-Generated.
My doctor used a word I had never had applied to me before. Depleted. She said it kindly, the way you might tell someone their car has finally stopped because there was never any oil in it. She said I needed to rest, properly, for a stretch of time, and I laughed, because rest was the one skill I had spent fifteen years unlearning.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Trust That Ran on Sixty-Two Lever Arch Files. AI-Generated.
I have kept the books for a small bursary trust in Pietermaritzburg for eleven years now. We are not a big operation. On a good year we put forty young people through college, most of them the first in their families to sit in a lecture hall, and I am the person who makes sure the money that pays for them can be accounted for down to the last rand. My name is not on the letterhead. My name is on the spines of sixty-two lever arch files, in my own handwriting, in the store cupboard behind my desk.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Year My Garden Ornaments Grew Heavier Than Me. AI-Generated.
It started with one ugly birdbath I did not set out to make anything. The first thing I ever cast was a birdbath, and it was genuinely ugly. My mother had died in the spring, and I could not sleep, and one night I found a bag of quick-set concrete in the shed that my late husband had bought years earlier for a job he never finished. I mixed some in an old washing-up bowl at two in the morning, pressed a dinner plate into the middle to make a dish shape, and left it on the back step. In the morning it had set into a lopsided grey saucer with my thumbprints all over the rim. I put it on a tree stump, filled it with water, and by lunchtime a pair of sparrows were fighting over it.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
