advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
My Father Kept Everything, and Sorting It Taught Me Who He Was. AI-Generated.
The workshop nobody wanted to open My father died in April, quietly, in the same Durban house he had lived in for forty years, and the hardest part was not the funeral. It was the workshop. He had a double garage that had not held a car since the nineties, packed floor to ceiling with the accumulated evidence of a man who genuinely believed that everything might one day be useful. Jars of screws sorted by size. Offcuts of teak he was saving for a project he never named. A drawer of watch parts, another of fishing reels, a shelf of radios in various states of surgery.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Neighbour Who Taught Me to Preserve, and the Question That Changed My Little Business. AI-Generated.
The lemons that started it When we moved into the house in Glenhazel, the previous owners had left behind a lemon tree that produced with an almost aggressive generosity. Every autumn it buried us in fruit we could not possibly use, and I felt guilty watching them drop and rot on the paving. My neighbour, an elderly woman named Mrs Feldman who had lived on that street since before I was born, watched me one Saturday scooping fallen lemons into the bin and said, through the fence, in a tone that was more instruction than suggestion, that I should be ashamed and that she would teach me to make preserves instead.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
I Came Home After Eight Years Away and Barely Recognised Myself. AI-Generated.
The return no one prepares you for Everyone warns you about leaving. Nobody warns you about coming back. I spent eight years in London, the first three thrilling and the last three grey and tired, and when my contract there ended and my mother's health started to wobble, I did the thing I had sworn for years I would never do. I came home to Johannesburg. I was thirty eight, single, with two suitcases and a head full of a city that no longer existed the way I remembered it.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Winter I Learned to Get Into Cold Water on Purpose. AI-Generated.
An accidental transplant I did not move to Cape Town for the mountain or the wine or any of the reasons people put on postcards. I moved because a lighting rental company offered me eleven months of steady work on a film crew, and after two years of stitching together freelance gigs in Gqeberha, eleven months of anything steady sounded like a small miracle. I said yes on the phone before I had thought about where I would actually live, which is the sort of decision you make at twenty nine when you are more afraid of standing still than of the unknown.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
I Tested 5 “Passive Income” Ideas
After trying to make money online with $0, I kept seeing one phrase everywhere: “Passive income.” So, what is passive income anyway? Most people think that passive income is getting money without having to do anything. That's not it. That's a gift or winning a lottery. Passive income is getting paid over and over for something you've already done or created, without having to redo that thing.
By Timothy A Rowland3 months ago in Journal
The Learner Who Found Me Through a Machine, Not a Neighbour. AI-Generated.
How people used to find me For most of my working life, the way somebody came to sit in my little white Corsa was simple. Somebody's cousin had passed. Somebody's aunty had heard I was patient with nervous people. A woman would stop me at the Shoprite in Polokwane and say, my daughter is terrified of the hill by the taxi rank, can you take her, and I would say bring her Tuesday at four, and that was that.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
