The SEPTA Chronicles, Part 1

I think that if I had to choose one aspect of Philadelphia that best captures the essence of the entire city, I would choose SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority. Thousands- maybe more- of Philadelphians ride SEPTA every day, whether it’s a bus, train, subway, elevated line, or trolley. These riders consist of any and every type of person, from the wealthy white businessman in a suit and tie, to the high school/university student on his/her way to class, to the most impoverished old alcoholic man who had to beg on the streets to pay for his bus fare. Some of these people ride SEPTA multiple times a day, every day; others have only boarded once in their lives. Many rely on it as their only means of transportation. Others use it primarily to get to their Center City jobs from the suburbs, because driving is

a nightmare.

What does this incredible diversity combined with such a high concentration of people in one specific type of public space mean to a budding young anthropologist who also happens to ride SEPTA every day? Well, I definitely don’t sleep through my morning trolley ride, that’s for sure.

Anyone who rides SEPTA with some degree of regularity will attest to the fact that there exists some sort of unwritten, unspoken list of rules and etiquette regulations for riders. This list is not something you can read, and it’s not something you can write down. It requires a considerable amount of time to learn the various rules, and even longer to master them. It’s something that can really only be learned through firsthand experience. And if that’s not daunting enough, don’t forget that you will be ridiculed by your fellow passengers if you break any of these rules, knowingly or otherwise. Really, if you’re not a quick learner, SEPTA might not be for you. SEPTA also might not be for you if you lack the ability to move the fuck away from the back door so people can get out, dammit.

Anyway, since I can’t really create a comprehensive list of SEPTA etiquette rules with any reasonable degree of accuracy, I figured I’d do the next best thing. I’ll share some of my more unusual personal experiences with SEPTA and the various rules I learned from those experiences. I will document these in another ongoing series called The SEPTA Chronicles. And the best part is that, as long as I continue to live in Philly, I will keep having new experiences that I can share!

The SEPTA Chronicles, Part 1: “Elderly or Disabled”

The first couple of seats in the front of all SEPTA buses are reserved for people who have a more difficult time getting around, such as old people, handicapped people, and fat people (only in Philadelphia.). However, it is typically permissible to occupy one of these seats if you don’t fall into one of the above categories, as long as no one else on the bus needs that seat more than you.

I sat in one of these seats one morning last summer as I rode the bus to work. It was one of the last open seats left, and I always prefer to sit in an open seat, even if it’s less-than-desirable, than to clog the aisle by standing unnecessarily. Plus, I fully intended to vacate that seat if someone got on who needed it.

As I sat and the bus drove on, I became engrossed in composing an email to Brad, wishing him good luck on a presentation he’d be giving that day. I wasn’t paying complete attention to my surroundings, but I was definitely keeping an eye out for anyone old or handicapped who might need my seat. This did not include the gentleman who was standing in front of me, so I didn’t notice him until he cleared his throat and said to me angrily, “Are you elderly or disabled?”

I looked up, taken aback by the question. “Uh, I’m sorry?” I said, and he repeated himself, this time more angrily.

“Are you elderly, or disabled?”

My confusion and surprise was justified, for multiple reasons. One, of course, was that a stranger had engaged me in conversation, seemingly at random, when I had clearly been otherwise occupied. But after this man had repeated himself, I realized that he expected me to yield my seat to him. In fact, he was clearly appalled by the fact that I hadn’t yet done so. This was the real source of my confusion, because this man, who conveyed his full-on outrage at my failure to vacate my seat for him by arrogantly asking if I was “elderly or disabled” when I was very clearly neither, was just as non-elderly and non-disabled as I was.

I mean, he was definitely older than me. I would have put him in his fifties at the oldest; more likely, he was in his late forties. He was slightly overweight, balding, and dressed in a suit, tie, and glasses, with no apparent evidence of a physical disability that prevented him from being able to stand for a slightly extended period of time. Well, unless you count Douchebag Disease as a physical disability. Because he definitely had that.

There was nothing at all wrong with this guy. There was no reason he couldn’t have stood, except for the fact that he was grumpy and lazy and thought he was more important than I was. He wanted to exert the authority he thought he had by kicking me out of my seat so he could sit his fugly ass down in it and feel a little better about the fact that he was such a horrible person.

And you know how I know he was a horrible person, aside from the fact that he was kicking me out of my seat? There were other open seats right across the aisle from me! But he didn’t sit there, because there were a couple of fat black ladies sitting next to those vacant seats, and they were spilling over slightly into the seats next to them. This peen-head was so racist and stupid that he was afraid to ask the ladies to skooch over a little bit to make room for him to sit down. He was afraid that they’d beat him up, or whatever it is that rich white guys are afraid that black women will do to them. And you know what? They probably could have. Hell, I probably could have popped him a good one in the jaw. His pompous, misogynistic view of the situation definitely would not have allowed him to expect me to stand up and hit him. It would have caught him completely off guard, and it certainly would have made me feel better.

Unfortunately, my confusion and shock at the gross inappropriateness of the whole situation prevented me from thinking of any clever response to his ridiculous question. I could only reply with a question of my own: “Um, do you want to sit here?” which came out sounding as stupid as it does here, reproduced in text. The guy obviously agreed, because he laughed sarcastically, and replied, “Yes. I want to sit there,” as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. As though I should have been able to realize without any prompting that he had infinitely more entitlement to this seat than I did. Though I had failed to realize that particular “fact,” I did learn a new SEPTA rule that day: It’s just never worth it to sit in the disabled seats, no matter how unneeded they may appear to be.

The Subway Kitten

One morning last spring, I was making my normal journey to school via Septa, Philly’s public transit system. My transfer from the trolley to the subway must have been inaccurately timed that day, because I missed the subway train by just a hair. It was one of those awful moments that every public transit rider knows- being at the top of the stairs and seeing the train at the bottom; knowing that you’re just far enough away to make it downstairs half a second after they close. You could try to make it, shoving children in the oncoming crowd out of your way as you run. But then you think about all the effort running down the stairs would take, and about how much energy you’d have to use shoving all those kids. So you resign yourself to the fact that you were meant to take the late train this morning, and you take your sweet time getting down those steps.

It must have been that act of succumbing to my fate that set the tone of my day. This may sound like a good and pleasant thing to some of you, but for me, it’s usually neither. When I’m in a fateful mood, things get intense. Something will happen, and I’ll get all excited and inspired and I’ll decide that it was Fate that put me there to witness that event, and as a result I feel obligated to take action in response to whatever it was that I witnessed. For some reason, in my mind, it becomes my civic duty, as dictated by some higher power, to intervene. It’s kind of like believing you’re a superhero. Many of my stupidest mistakes and decisions are made this way.

Case in point: when I got downstairs that day after missing the subway and saw a tiny black kitten stranded down on the tracks, it took me about a second and a half to decide that Fate was at work, and that I needed to act accordingly.

I think it goes without saying that I am, um, kind of a “cat person.” Whenever I see one- anywhere, in any situation- my brain goes “Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!” and I need to go pet it and poke it in the face and have other such physical interactions with it. If I don’t, my brain keeps yelling long after the cat has left my presence, until something else adequately distracts me. This happens with my own cats, with other people’s cats, with cats I see in windows as I walk by houses, and with lions and tigers at the zoo. So there is no reason to believe that this obsessive need was not the driving force behind my almost-immediate decision to go rescue the kitten I saw on the tracks. It’s just that my brain has had enough experience with this sort of thing to be able to hide my highly flawed reasoning behind the whole Fate thing, and so my thought process went like this:

Kitty! Kitty! Look at the- wait, holy shit. I was put here at this place and this time this morning to rescue this cat. Without my direct intervention, this KITTY! will definitely die.

I got all serious and determined. There weren’t many other people standing on the platform yet, and I knew that because a train had just left, I had at least five minutes to jump down to the tracks, grab the cat, and haul myself back up. School became unimportant. I began to re-plan the rest of my day: this kitten was tiny, and I could easily carry it back home with me on the trolley, get it into a carrier, and take it to the vet. My brain kept zooming out further and further, and I kept thinking about things on a bigger and bigger scale. I went from the amount of time I needed to execute the rescue, to the logistics of getting the kitten back home, to where I could keep the kitten until I moved into a new apartment in a few months, to the fact that we’d been planning on getting a new kitten when we moved anyway, and a black one at that, so how perfect was it that this just happened to be a little black kitten? And then I was back to thinking about it in terms of fate, and away went any hope of me thinking about this in a rational, logical, truthful way.

Seriously, what is wrong with my brain that the thought “if you jump down into the subway tracks, you might get run over or get electrocuted or both” floated in and back out so quickly that it really wasn’t even a factor? Why didn’t I consider the possibility that this kitten might run from me once I got down there, and that it might not be the simple, 30-second rescue I had planned? Why didn’t I think to go upstairs and get an authority figure to radio the approaching train and tell it to stop? Why didn’t I take into account all of the completely legitimate points that everyone else effortlessly pointed out to me later in the day: a train had just left the tracks, and it obviously hadn’t run over the kitten. The kitten probably lived in the subway. There was probably a colony of feral cats that made its home in the depths of the subway tunnels, and this one had just wandered out a little too far. Oh, and the most important one: it’s just a fucking cat. It’s not worth getting yourself killed by a train.

I think I didn’t consider all these things because my entire thought process, and in fact the entire situation I’ve described up until now, took place within about six seconds. And in those six seconds, I was having a really hard time getting any other thoughts around “Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!” The few thoughts that did manage to squeeze out were the ridiculous, illogical ones. And that is a true testament to my character. My ridiculous, irrational, feline-obsessed character.

Anyway, things indeed did not go as I had so carefully, meticulously planned them. That was mostly because when other people see you toss your bag aside, sit down on the ground, and swing your legs over the platform into the tracks, they freak out a little. I couldn’t understand why no one else was as concerned as I was. This was the life of an innocent baby animal we were talking about. Someone had obviously tossed it onto the tracks, and it was too small to jump back up, leaving it helpless and doomed unless I intervened. I spent a minute or two fruitlessly trying to convince everyone else that what I was about to do was both necessary and safe. They spent the same amount of time trying to explain to me that it was neither. One guy said, “Are you sure it wasn’t a rat?” which pushed me over the edge from Urgent and Anxious to About to Shit A Brick. I (quite literally) teetered on the edge of my decision for a second, and then I realized I couldn’t see the kitten anymore.

Whereas this should have made me happier by convincing me that the kitten was able to escape somewhere, it further distressed me by making me think, “Where’d the kitty go?? Kitty come back! Kitty!” So I swung myself around, now completely horizontal on the dirty, disgusting subway floor, and hung my head into the track area. I spotted the kitten after a second, crouched in a small square cutout that receded about 6-8 inches into the wall. Someone else saw him too (someone who was standing up like a normal person, rendering my dangerous position dangling out into the tracks completely unnecessary), and used the opportunity to point out to me that the kitten would be fine, because he was able to hide there.

The stranger’s ability to realize and point out the logical thought that I couldn’t seem to produce was what finally made me realize that I was lying on the ground in the subway station and everyone was staring at me. It was this- the knowledge that the kitten was safe from harm, and not the sound of the next train approaching and the fact that I would be killed if I stayed there much longer- that made me stand up, dust myself off, and part ways with the kitty.

I spent the rest of the way wondering if I had followed my fate or if I had defied it by not going after the kitten (even though, obviously, if fate is real then it’s impossible to defy… but I didn’t seem to think of that one either). It’s clear now that I was meant for bigger and better black kittens, because a few months later I adopted Bug, my wonderful little princess who steals my food, knocks everything off my night table in the middle of the night, eats my plants, and takes some of the smelliest shits I have ever experienced. No, if I had gone down into the subway that day, I may never have experienced such a wonderful pet. And I wouldn’t have learned an important life lesson: fate-inspired ideas on weekday mornings are never good ones.