Day 179 - Part-time Story

Part-time Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Alan lived a part-time existence. He didn’t believe in anything full-time. Some people bandied about phrases like “give it your all” or “110% effort.” Alan didn’t know what that meant or why anyone would ever want to give their all to something or someone else. To him, time was just about the only commodity he had, and he hadn’t found anything that was worth a full amount of it.

Alan’s wife Anya was just about the perfect partner for him. They worked incredibly well together as a team. Anya lived a multitasking existence. She was quite adept at handling five or six projects at the same time. She enjoyed the challenge and puzzle-solving aspect to multitasking. She wasn’t very concerned about what exactly she was multitasking, which made things work all the better with Alan, because she could help multitask all the parts of his part-time life.

Alan was a part-time employee with a plethora of part-time jobs. Alan thought this made him interesting. Bosses were not as impressed. Alan had at least two jobs for each day of the week. In the morning Alan delivered newspapers and at night he ran trivia nights at bars and played host at meetup events. On the weekends he was an event planner and worked at seasonal events like fairs and concerts. During his days he rotated part-time jobs – anything from cleaning companies to data entry and reception desks. No single job ever paid all his bills. No single job ever took up a standard workday amount of time.

There were many stresses within his marriage because Alan was always looking for work. Nothing was ever consistent and he got bored easily. Even when he was working, jobs would come and go, contracts would expire, and leads would dry up. Most of his jobs required some bit of chance – did he make a sale, would someone buy something for an online store, things like that. It was fairly inconsistent and happened at random times. Some months were great. Some were beyond poverty. Part-time unemployment might have been a better term.

Being a part-time husband didn’t always work. Alan was always true to Anya, he was never a part-time husband in that respect, but he wasn’t a great husband. A man who was only invested part-time could never be a great husband. He valued her values like he valued his own – part-time. He committed to her hobbies and their activities the way he committed to his own – part-time. If Anya had been a more demanding woman, their relationship would never have worked. He started lots of projects and hobbies and finished few.

In many ways their idiosyncratic nature resulted in them having an unfulfilled, underdeveloped lifestyle. His life at home was wildly inconsistent. He cleaned some of the time, he cooked some of the time, and he was home only some of the time. Rooms were half unfurnished; books were half read; paintings were half painted. Some might call him lazy. Some thought he had attention deficient problems.

Alan was not an easy man to know or get along with. He was often unavailable and regularly had too many commitments and not enough time. He was very social with lots of friends and a large social network. He attended parties often and threw many himself. When he threw a party there was always an eclectic mix of people and there were always multiple themes and activities. He had costume party wine tasting events and beer brewing game nights. His parties were always combinations of conflicting events much the same as his personality was also a hodgepodge.

In the end, Alan never did anything very well, but he did lots and lots of things. And he was always trying to find more to do. He always told anyone that would listen, that time was his only commodity, but deep down inside he was motivated more from a fear of standing still than a fear of running out of time. If he stood still, he would have to fully recognize who he was and learn to accept and live with himself, and the one thing he had never wanted to do was do anything fully. It was much easier to always be on the run and always running faster, trying to fill the void with distractions. If he could just learn to only focus on the distractions, he’d be okay.