Matt is wrangling C&D this morning while I have a chance to people-watch and catch up on all my half-written blog posts at the city’s newest, hippest Montrose coffee house. People–the hip people, the cool people, the with-it people–supposedly study here, date here, socialize here, write here. Sitting in front of my laptop occupying a tiny cafe table, eating a chicken-empanada-and-goat-cheese empanada, and listening to the thunder outside, I can pretend I’m pretty hip, myself.

But this morning, I’m failing at playing hip-mama-blogs-at-the-coffeehouse. In either case, it’s not working so well. The music is loud, and distracting. Two large flat-screen televisions (said as if anybody buys or even wants small flat-screen televisions) sit at each corner of the space, on mute but distracting us with the bright, blinking colors of a news channel. The music alternates between music I knew in fifth grade and music I should have heard sometime after, if I was cool enough. The music makes me rub my head. I’m feeling fuzzy.  The coffee people are making loud coffee-making noises with grinders and steamers and the cash register drawer. I am considering going back to bed.

It’s a little ironic. When we bought our house, we reasoned that we didn’t need an office because we had spaces all around to work, in bright, friendly, semi-social environments like coffee houses and sandwich shops and the cozy libraries. Now that I’ve bought the tiny-bedroomed house, with no office but the living room with the loud Sistine Chapel acoustics, I want an office with no-one else in it.

Maybe some of it is just the current state of my ears and eyes, observed in posts like this one about the buffalo upstairs.

Whatever, I’m going to sit here as long as I can stand, maybe an hour, trying to edit and write while I distractedly eye the weather man on the television, listen to the  squeaky-voiced lady lady ten feet away rave about her garbanzo quiche, and try to ingore that I’m sitting under an A/C vent and I have goosebumps on my arms in the middle of July.