Em Rupp

6:00 am. That’s when my first alarm goes off on Wednesday mornings. I don’t have to leave the door to get to work until around 7:45 am, but if I’m going to get out of bed without being so drowsy that I fall back asleep right on the steps of my house, I need the extra buffer to lay in bed while I let a few more alarms beep away. Thankfully my morning routine itself doesn’t take too long.

Today is also pay day for me. I get early direct deposit, so those funds hit my bank account every other Wednesday. It also means I add one extra part to my morning routine: calculating exactly how much money I’ll have left in my bank account after I go and pay all the bills I need to. Fun times.

Once I do that and all the other steps in my morning routine, I realize I’m leaving the house at 7:49. I had gotten a tad distracted because I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to wear. In some ways, it’s silly for me to fuss over my outfits when I end up changing into a uniform at work, but I knew I wanted to go out somewhere when I left my shift. However, even leaving just a few minutes later than I scheduled for can stress me out on the days where I come into work by 8:30.

See, I take SEPTA into work every day. Specifically, I take the el. Sure, at this time of day, the train is scheduled to come every 6 minutes, but if you’re a frequent rider like me, you know that a train being scheduled at a time doesn’t mean crap. Just the day before, I got to York-Dauphin station and neither the 7:54 train nor the 8:00 train showed up. The 8:06 train showed at 8:07, and as you can expect during such a prime rush hour, it was as crowded as can be. I was lucky to squeeze in, but I was still a couple minutes late to work because the overcrowding caused everything to slow down. So, naturally, I feel a bit stressed when it comes to the trains. If I’m late and don’t show up on time for the 7:54 train, what if the 8:00 train doesn’t come? What if the 8:06 doesn’t come either?

Thankfully, SEPTA was running a tad better today. I thought I had missed the 7:54 train, but it showed up at 7:57, shortly after I had arrived on the platform. I hopped on at the very front car, which tends to be my strategy. With the exception of how Spring Garden station is laid out, most of the time people hop on the cars in the middle first. The front car has less people trying to get on it, so it’s more likely for me to find room. Once the train started to take off, I opened up my Spotify app and started playing some music from an alt-pop mix. It just seemed like the move for the day.

After about 15 minutes, the train pulled into 15th Street station. Another reason I like to hop on the first car is that, when you’re going westbound, the nearest exit from that first car opens out onto 16th Street, which puts me one block closer to work than getting out at 15th Street would. We love a good shortcut, don’t we?

As I came out of that exit, it struck me exactly just how gloomy today was. It was grey back up in East Kensington, sure, but there was something about the Center City buildings that were trapping a layer of fog down the streets. If it wasn’t that peak time of day where everyone is rushing to get to work or grab a coffee out of Starbucks or a breakfast sandwich from the food carts, I would’ve said it gave Philly a ghostly quality. But how can something full of the hustle and bustle of people ever be truly ghostly?

As for the details of work, I don’t want to get into those too much. Part of it is that work iswork, but I also just feel weird telling strangers on the internet exactly where it is I work.My online persona is separate from my work one, thanks. But it would be remiss to not mention how certain things about work impact my day. I work with the public, so I get to really experience the full range of people that make up Philly. People come into myworkplace from all neighborhoods—and even beyond the city. Students, tourists, working professionals, people that come in off the street…If you’re looking for a type ofPhiladelphian, I’ve probably met them at work.

I also had a moment there that stuck with me in a bad way. I went into a Zoom meeting for a mentorship call about career development. And at one point in the call, when my mentor was trying to catch up the other mentee that hopped on late, my mentor repeatedly misgendered me. My pronouns are they/them, and they are displayed very clearly next to my name on Zoom. This is far from the first meeting I’ve had with this mentor as well. By now, he should’ve known my pronouns. It took everything in me to not fully snap. I was a bit sassy about it in the chat box anyways, but that was much calmer than what I would’ve done had I come off mute.

After that call, I came back down onto the working floor, and as I plugged my personal phone into the charger, that’s when I noticed my phone had blown up with notifications. Namely, they were notifications from my sports apps, alerting me that my two favorite hockey teams had traded away players.

The work I will talk about online is my side hustle. I write for a hockey blog, specifically one about the Seattle Kraken. If you’re wondering why someone in Philly wouldn’t write about the Flyers, it was mostly that with the Kraken being an expansion team introduced in 2021, as someone that had never been paid to write about hockey prior, it felt like a good way to get my foot in the door. And it worked, seeing as I get to write for this blog. The NHL’s trade deadline was still 2 days away, but teams get those gears turning throughout the entire week. I just felt mad that this was all happening while I was at my day job and couldn’t even try to contribute any breaking news for the blog. They could’ve waited just a few more hours…

As my shift started winding down, I was bemoaning the weather outside. The gloominess from the morning had turned into heavy rain. I knew I was going to have to walk around 7minutes in that rain. Even with a hat and coat on, being in heavy rainfall is miserable to me. As I left work at around 5:45, it didn’t get any better, so I had to just brave it. I made it to the corner of 16th and Market where I went down that shortcut to the el, but then walked the full extent of the platform and down to the BSL platforms. Then I crossed from there to get to the westbound trolley platforms. Honestly, getting to the trolleys at 15th Street station is not intuitive to new riders if you’re not coming in from the entrances at Dilworth Park. I still remember my first time trying to find that trolley station while I was still just a visitor to Philly. I wanted to go to Dock Street Brewing, because I’d heard it was the city’s oldest operating brewery, and someone loitering around the station noticed that I was going around in circles and showed me the way to the trolleys.

Tonight, I was actually headed to the exact same building. It’s no longer Dock Street, as they closed that location back in 2022. But another brewery, Carbon Copy, has taken its place. I was on my way out into West Philly for the night for one reason: I wanted to get their stamp on my March Mildness passport.

For context, Forest & Main Brewing up in Ambler decided to take on a tradition started by a brewery out in Seattle to celebrate the mild style of beer. For this year, Forest & Main reached out to various breweries within 100 miles of their location to be participating stops. Each brewery has a mild of their own creation on tap, and the idea is to collect as many stamps as you can before the big party on April 6. Carbon Copy is one of the participating breweries, and somehow it just made the most sense to check off the sole West Philly stop on the list by going after work.

I got off the trolley at 50th and Baltimore, and it was still pouring down rain, but at least Carbon Copy sits almost directly next to the stop. I went inside, ordered my mild, and settled in. It was a little busy that night to where I had one of the very last seats at the bar, all the way at the very end. It all made sense, though, when I suddenly heard someone announce over a microphone that it was quizzo night. Quizzo seems to be an extremely popular event with breweries during the weekdays, because I have definitely stumbled my way into multiple quizzo nights when I just wanted to go somewhere for a post-work beer.

Even though I know people have done it, playing quizzo solo just isn’t nearly as fun as doing it in a group. So I sat there, drinking my beer, as various questions about snack foods and geography were asked. After I finished my mild, I asked for the porter on tap. I’m never at Carbon Copy enough, so I didn’t want to just order one beer and bounce. I wanted to be able to enjoy a little bit more of the menu. Then later, I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and I was quite hungry, so I ordered a cheese pizza. When I say I was hungry, I mean it. The pizzas at Carbon Copy are 15 inches, and I ate 3/4ths of that thing all by myself. It probably helped that I am (unpopular opinion alert) not a crust eater. Saves a little extra room in my stomach. But it was a lot of pizza for one person to eat. I also ended up ordering a third beer, because I ran out of my second in the middle of eating my pizza. I probably didn’t need a third drink, but hey, why not?

By that point in the night, quizzo shifted to a round on Philadelphia. I kind of laughed to myself a bit, knowing that today was my day to share what I’m doing throughout the city. What were the odds that a round would have a theme about general Philly knowledge?Some of the questions I didn’t know (such as what year one of the bus routes first came into service), but the sports related questions were my bread and butter. Maybe if I had played, I could’ve done decently for myself.

Once quizzo ended, my third beer was almost empty, and I didn’t have room for any more pizza. With that, I closed out my tab, and saw that the next trolley back into Center City was only minutes away according to Google Maps. I went outside, and the rain had thankfully stopped. When the trolley came along, I hopped on, transferred at 30th Street to get onto the el, and then took that all the way back to York-Dauphin station before walking home.

From there, it was time to go through the motions of my nighttime routine, set my alarms for in the morning, and get ready for bed.

Em is a nonbinary Philadelphian with a love of hockey, baseball, craft beer, pop punk and indie rock, and writing. You can find them on Instagram @enbykraken