Coffee Bean observations (from July 4)

This cafe is nice; I like it. The music is the kind of music that should be in all cafes. Some, like Caffe Bene, play rap music, pop music, shiny, catchy music designed to get your attention just like all the flashing neon signs in this city. Coffee Bean's music is soft, light, and flowing. Like a river, you know it's there, you can hear it, you can see it, but it doesn't rob you of your attention; you can still think. It's much better to think in front of a river than in front of a neon sign.
The place is clean too. Shiny stone floors, shiny, soft, black leather chairs. The wood tabletops shine too. It's not stuffy, smells cool and fresh. The smoking area is nearby, and a faint cigarette smell wafts in at times, not intruding, but hinting, and it reminds me of my grandmother's house.
There are three other people in the room. I wonder if they have any idea if I'm writing about them. Two of them are a couple. They're sitting in the leather chairs by the windows like everyone else in the room; the hard wood, wicker, and metal chairs in the center of the room are empty, like a desert in the middle of an oasis. The man is wearing a kind of Che Guevara hat and thick black-rimmed glasses. He looks out the window a lot, presumably thinking. His girlfriend has short hair, isn't dressed too fancy, but still talks on her phone too much. When she talks to him, he smiles and listens, but she talks much more than him. She's very skinny. Thin arms jut out of her billowy yellow T-shirt and thin legs prop her up behind billowy blue pants that hang like curtains. She's pretty and stylish. They just left.

Now it's just me and an artist girl sitting at the table in front of me, facing me. We made eye contact for a moment when I first sat down and I couldn't tell if she was a girl or a man with long hair. She's not girlishly pretty. But now that I look at her she's prettier than that glimpse revealed. Longish hair, half tied, falling around her face, unkempt. She's wearing a shirt that looks like a man's shirt, a gray button-down, a bit too big for her. She had two books on the table before, the top one was about Andy Warhol. She didn't look at them, she was always looking at her phone instead. She has an iPhone, like everyone else. Now that she is standing up, I see she's wearing a bright red skirt and sport shoes and bouncing as she walks. Her entire body is very different from the top half I saw of her over the table. Her art books are in one of her two army green bags.