In one place, I work part-time in a café-bar that serves coffee, pie, and cheap wine in carafes. I like the job because the café-bar is slow and I can read; it’s so slow I wonder how the owner, whom I never see, covers the bills. I wonder if, after paying me and the other part-time worker, he breaks even.

I’ve done the math, and the money I earn at the café-bar just covers the expense of commuting to the other place (surround) to fulfill the obligations of my other two jobs: the expense of the train, some food and drink, and rent for the time-shared room in the corner apartment with the bodega/playground view. The job at the café-bar helps me break even.

I could just call the two places the village and the city, since that’s what they technically are.

My second job is different. My second job is as a mediator-in-training. When I get a call, I travel south to the city to assist my mentor with cases.

I can’t tell you about the cases; they’re covered by a confidentiality agreement I signed when I began my training, and which I sign again in front of each new set of clients. What I can tell you is that, to my mind, the work with my mentor is worth the hours I put in at the café-bar to support my commute. For one thing, the work is interesting; for another, it is the closest I have come to investing in my future: even at the apprentice stage, it pays the most of my three jobs.

But in the place where I am most often—in the village, where my life is manageable and where I work at the café-bar—it’s hard to come by employment as a mediator. Though sometimes working at the café-bar feels like supplemental training.

My third job, the one at which I met the capitalist, is a holdover from my former line of work. It’s a waged job, like the café-bar, but in the information sector rather than the service sector.

I don’t like my third job. I have arguments with its purpose. I would like, once my current obligations to the capitalist are complete, to cut back to just the two jobs. I have only one mouth to feed, after all.

Unfortunately, the work that has stopped through no fault of my own is not the third job, the one I argue with and want to leave behind. My mentor has vanished and isn’t returning my calls.

Now I have two jobs, but they aren’t the two jobs I want. Still, a hole in my schedule has created the opening necessary to catch up with Love.

A SYLLABUS

I’ve fallen twice for philosophers. The first one studied a fascist—still does. The second one studied, still studies, forms of love.