Airport musings

I'm at the New Orleans airport for the next few hours. I had a ticket on a flight for 7:40 this morning, but it was oversold, so I volunteered to give up my seat in exchange for a $325 flight voucher and $20 worth of meal coupons. The flight voucher is transferable, so I could (if I didn't want it to fly to California this January, which I do) sell it to someone else and get the value or some large fraction thereof in cash. Let's assume that I could get $300 cash for the $325 voucher. Therefore, by agreeing to wait 7 extra hours for a flight, I'm earning $300, or roughly $42.86 per hour.

Perhaps if I don't manage to get a job in anthropology after I finish my Ph.D., I could look into getting bumped from airlines as an alternative career path. If I got bumped from just 3 flights a week, at $300 per flight (assuming a strong market for discounted airline vouchers, which seems a reasonable assumption in light of recent trends in airline prices for tickets and services), and worked 50 weeks a year, I'd earn a cool $45,000 a year before taxes, though I'm not sure how I would pay taxes. This is nearly double what I'm currently earning as a graduate student in anthropology and roughly equal to what I could expect to make as a junior prof.

(I really do crunch numbers like this in my head all the time. I love calculating the counterfactual- it affords me, however briefly, an exhilarating illusion of control.)

Speaking of anthropology... I'm on my way back to Charlottesville after a 4-day marathon stint at the yearly American Anthropological Association conference. I made a common first-timer mistake and binged on panels, attending somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 panel discussions (though I think that I actually sat all the way through only the panel on which I presented). I heard a few great papers, a few really terrible ones, and quite a few that fell somewhere in between. As is typical from what I've heard from other veteran conference attenders, the best moments happened outside of what was scheduled on the conference program: I met one of my ethnographic heroes, saw a renowned theorist vigorously and liberally applying chapstick, made friends with some cool Deafies doing some awesome international research, had beignets at the Cafe du Monde, hung out with some old friends from my MA program, and spent time bonding with my new associates in my PhD program.

Last night at a party I had a Really Meaningful Conversation with an alum of our department about what anthropology is, what it isn't, and why it's worth doing. After all the sound and fury of the conference, that quiet chat over gin and tonics was probably the most worthwhile learning experience of my entire New Orleans adventure. I have a feeling that I'll be pondering that conversation for a while.

And now back to my regularly scheduled mountains of homework... let's see how much of Karen Ho's Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street I can read and outline in the airport!