coffee shop memoirs part II

I’m at my small asian coffee shop since I have decided to boycott sweetwaters during finals time because

a) they have like 3 outlets

b) it’s too much of a scene (go to be seen and heard. Look I’m studying! I’m at sweetwaters! I’m so hardcore!)

c) my asian coffee shop is cheaper

Anyways this place seems to be a little more family oriented as i always see parents bringing in thier kids. Like this woman i'm sitting across from. I'm guessing she's either a grad student or a professor and she's on her laptop doing work, drinkign coffee, and her son is about 10 and he's drinking hot chocolate from a coffee mug and doing some type of reading for fun. I imagine this is how academics spend quality time and bond with their kids. And i imagine it must be so cool for the kids because they get to pretend to be "doing work like my mom" and they drink "kids coffee." Like earlier this woman had her 2 really cute sons and she was like "ok after this we can either go home, take a walk around town, or take a ride on the bus." And her sons were like "THE BUS!! I WANT TO RIDE THE BUS!!" And i imagine this is pretty standard if you are a kid growing up in a college town, you go to coffee shops with your mom in the middle of the afternoon and get excited about riding the bus around town. I see stuff liek this alot and i wonder, if this what my kids lives are gonna be like? I think most academic parents spend all their time in their offices and not enough time with their kids. not that we have time to like play and run and skip and do all that crap. but just including your kids is really nice

I'm having flashbacks to when my dad would take me to work and we’d have bonding time together. My dad has been crazy busy my whole life, leaving the house at 5:30am and coming home at 9 every night. I mean I guess you have to work pretty damn hard to have people dedicate haiku’s to you . But despite all of that I think we still spent a lot of time together. He used to take me to work during the summer and on my vacation breaks from school and i would help him and we didn't really talk much but i felt liek he taught me lessons in life just by watching him. I really understood how hard he worked to get where he was and it made me appreciate him and i understood that when he was busy he really was busy, and he would tell me while we were working that he worked hard so that i wouldn't have to. And i used to say "but papi, am i going to get the lunch truck when you retire? who is going to take over? do you want me to take it over?" and he woudl say "Mija, you are better than that. I would be disappointed if after all of my hard work you ended up doing what i do." My dad wasn't a professor and he's never worn a suit to work but he understood that it's importnat to include your kids. And then on saturdays when my mom needed alone time we would get in my dad's fiat and drive down to the beach and eat clam chowder and my dad would read the newspaper and i'd read the comics and it was awesome.

so i guess what i'm saying is, i would like to be the kind of professor who takes their kids to coffee shops and spends quailty time with them.