advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Bead I Kept Threading Onto the Wrong Hole. AI-Generated.
I have been doing beadwork since I was a girl in the Eastern Cape, and I am now sixty one years old, living in a small flat in Kensington, Johannesburg. My grandmother taught me on a stoep with a tin of glass beads that caught the sun, and I have never really stopped. For decades my hands knew the work better than my eyes did. I could thread a needle in the near dark, feel the bead settle, feel the tension of the cotton, and keep going while I talked to whoever was in the room. It was the one thing in my life that never asked me to concentrate. It just happened.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Nephew Who Lined Up My Shoes By Colour. AI-Generated.
I am the uncle who was good at the fun and useless at the rest. That was my role in the family for a long time, and I was comfortable in it. My sister, Nolwazi, has a son called Sipho, and for the first four years of his life I was the one who arrived with the wrong kind of sweets and left before the difficult parts, and I told myself I was the favourite uncle when really I was just the least present one. It took a broken ankle to change that. Hers, not mine.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Morning My Own House Locked Me Out From the Inside. AI-Generated.
The house I grew up in did everything slowly and loudly, and I loved it for that. It announced itself. The geyser groaned before it gave hot water. The front gate had a squeak you could set your watch by. And the garage, oh, the garage door made a sound like an old ship coming into harbour, a long metal complaint that my father used to say was the house telling us he was home. I never thought about that door as a machine. It was just part of the voice of the place, the way your parents' cough is part of the sound of a house before you understand that people do not last forever.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Six Hundred Steps I Owed My Cardiologist. AI-Generated.
The card said six hundred. Not six hundred a day, which would have been an insult to my pride, but six hundred steps at a stretch before I was allowed to stop and let my heart settle. That was the deal my cardiologist wrote out for me in blue pen on the back of an appointment card after the stent went in, and I kept that card in my shirt pocket for months like it was a talisman. Six hundred steps. Then rest. Then, when my body agreed, a few hundred more.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Chain My Aunt Gave Me For Matric, And The Coffee Cart It Became. AI-Generated.
The gifts I never wore I am a man who was given a lot of gold he never once put on. This is a common thing where I come from, in the East of Johannesburg, in a family where gold is how people say I love you and I am proud of you without having to say the words. A chain when I passed matric. A ring from my grandmother when I turned twenty-one, far too big, meant to be grown into. A bracelet from an uncle after my first proper job. A signet ring nobody remembers the occasion for. All of it lived in a small wooden box on top of my wardrobe, and all of it stayed there, because I am simply not a jewellery man. I own two pairs of takkies and one belt. Gold on my body always felt like a costume.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Year I Finally Cashed In the Holiday I Kept Postponing. AI-Generated.
I am a hospital pharmacist, and for eleven years I did not take a proper holiday. I took days here and there, the odd long weekend, a week once when my mother was ill that does not count because I spent it in a different hospital. But a real holiday, the kind where you do not know or care what day it is, I kept promising myself and kept not doing.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Shoebox of Handwritten Slips, and Why I Finally Let It Go. AI-Generated.
I opened a secondhand bookshop in a small town in the Karoo, which everyone I know agrees is a foolish way to try to make a living, and which I would not undo for anything. The town is the sort of place where the main street has a butcher, a hardware store, a coffee shop that opens when the owner feels like it, and now, for the last three years, me, wedged between the pharmacy and a shop that sells everything from wool to fan belts.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Grey Washing on My Grandmother's Line. AI-Generated.
My grandmother pegged out white sheets every Monday of her life, and every Monday they came in grey. She lived at the end of a gravel road, the last house before the land opened up into the workings where the trucks ran, and between her and the horizon there was nothing but a wide dirt track that carried heavy vehicles all day and half the night. When the wind came from the wrong direction, which was most days, it brought the road with it.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Appointment I Rescheduled Four Times Before I Actually Went. AI-Generated.
The card on the fridge There was a little reminder card stuck to my fridge in Durban for the better part of a year, held up by a magnet shaped like a pineapple that my daughter bought me as a joke. The card was for an appointment I kept making and kept moving. Every time the date came close I would find a reason. A parent meeting at the school. A cold I did not want to spread. A weekend my sister was visiting from Pietermaritzburg. Perfectly reasonable reasons, every one of them, and all of them lies of a certain kind, because underneath was the real reason, which was that I did not want to go.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Route I Drive Three Times a Week, and the Small Things That Kept Falling Off the Dashboard. AI-Generated.
I teach piano in people's homes. This is not a glamorous way to earn a living, and nobody warns you when you start out that the real skill is not sight reading or scales but driving. I cover a loop that runs from Kenilworth up through the southern suburbs of Cape Town, across to a family in Rondebosch, then back down toward Muizenberg for my last two pupils of the afternoon. Three times a week I drive that loop. I have driven it in winter when the rain comes sideways off the mountain, and in February when the tar goes soft and the light lasts until eight.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Winter My Head Would Not Switch Off At Two In The Morning. AI-Generated.
The nursery, and the year it nearly went under I have run a small plant nursery on the edge of town for going on nine years. It is the kind of place where people wander in on a Saturday looking for one tomato seedling and leave with a boot full of herbs and a fern they did not plan on. I am good with living things. I can look at a leaf and tell you whether the problem is too much water or too little light. What I turned out to be very bad at, for one particular winter, was looking after the one nervous system that actually belonged to me.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Bracelet I Kept In A Sock Drawer To Prove A Point. AI-Generated.
The drawer I did not open For a long time I kept a small pile of gold in the back of a sock drawer, and I want to be clear that I did not keep it for sentimental reasons. I kept it to prove a point I had never actually said out loud to anyone. There was a bracelet, a thin chain with a broken clasp, a ring I had stopped wearing years before, and a pair of earrings that had lost their backs. All of it had come from the same person, a man I was with for most of my thirties, and all of it had outlasted the relationship by a comfortable margin.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
