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A few years ago, I was complaining about Seattle weather on the phone with my mother, who has lived in the South for most of her adult life, a region where, when it rains, it quite literally pours. "Well, sure, it rains a lot there," my mom said. "But it's a dry rain, isn't it?"

She had point. On dry rain days, the rain is just a mist, something you'd barely even notice if it didn't make your glasses fog up. On days like today, however, the dry rain becomes a wet rain, and people like myself, those who usually prefer to walk or bike to work, clog up the buses with our bad attitudes and sopping wet coats. The extra bodies make the bus reek of wet dog, and the fetid air—combined with traffic, which is always worse when it rains—makes travel on days like today a small misery.

I was in this misery this morning, sitting at the front of the 2 bus in the sideways-facing seats reserved for the infirm, the pregnant, the elderly, and people in wheelchairs. I, along with everyone else in the section, seemed perfectly able to stand on our own, but you know how it is. The seats are there. The bus is packed. You take them. My ride wasn't long, just up one hill and down another, and at the first stop, a man got on the bus looking like he was on his way to Red Square—the one in Moscow, not the U District. He had a wide goatee across his chin and was wearing a long wool coat, a fur cap with flaps over the ears, and there was a silver-embossed horn slung across his chest. It looked like a type of musical instrument, something you would blow into, or maybe an elaborate vessel for drinking.

The man parked himself right in front of me and held onto the bus handles, one in each hand, his body facing towards mine. When I looked up, he was staring down, directly into my face. I looked down at my phone, trying, in quintessential Seattle fashion, to ignore what was going on around me, but every time I would glance up, there was the man, staring back, as though he wanted to tell me something. I started to get anxious—Don't you know making eye contact on public transit is illegal around here, I thought to myself—but the scenario was just odd enough to be amusing. I'm about to get hacked to death on the bus with a horn, I thought, the man's crotch still eye-level with my face. The upside is I won't have to go to work.

Blissfully, my stop arrived quick. As I got up and walked toward the exit, the man with the horn immediately gestured to an elderly woman standing beside him, someone I hadn't noticed in my effort to ignore my surroundings. He was offering her my seat, and I understood—or at least, I think I understood—why he'd been staring. The man probably saw me—young, healthy, generally able to stand on my own feet—taking up a seat designated for the sick and the old. He wasn't about to murder me; he was trying to shame me, and quite honestly, I deserved it.

My girlfriend and I refer to what the man was doing as "social reform," and it's something we do as often as possible ourselves. She's better and more obvious about it than I am. Had I been the one watching there while some little shitbag let an elderly or disabled person waver, I probably would have just glared, as the man did, but my girlfriend would have actually uses her voice. When she sees someone walking across the street, their eyes buried in their phones, she yells, "Eyes up, people. It's not just about you!" When our neighbors fail to break down their boxes before they put them in the recycling, she'll take them out of the blue bins, attach a note, and leave the box in front of the offender's place. "Other people use these bins!," she'll write. "Please leave room for everyone else.” This, surprisingly, works, and I'm pretty sure the world is better off for it.

Urban living is a constant, shifting dance we do with the people around us, and yet, more and more, we exist in our own solipsistic worlds. We wear earbuds and sunglasses and hoods, another layer of insulation from our surroundings. We don't notice that we're clogging up busses or walking into traffic without looking up. We’re so absorbed in our machines or with our own problems, we don't see other people until they are directly in front of us, if we see them at all. And so I would like to thank the man in the fur cap who stared at me on the 2 bus this morning for reminding me, in his way, that sometimes you need to give up your seat. Still, we're all more likely to get the message when you actually use your voice, so next time, perhaps you, too, could speak up.