With an insouciance borne of too much air travel — three transcontinental round-trips a year, for starters — I leave home 1.5 hours before the flight's scheduled to leave. The drive usually takes 26 minutes on the nose via the Garden State Parkway, but there's midday traffic on the local shortcut. Snaking through the line, I finally reach the desk agent 52 minutes before takeoff.

She shakes her head: "I'm sorry, Ms. Lee. You have to be here an hour beforehand, and with the bag to check... You'll probably have to come back tomorrow. There's a ten o'clock, but it's completely sold out. I'll try to put you on standby..."

At this point a neighboring Australia-bound gentleman fell into trouble with his check-in. The agent, performaning triage (hisflight was leaving in about an hour, whereas I'd apparently been deemed beyond hope) spent several minutes straightening him out while I agonized over how I could make this situation less stupid for myself. I pictured slinking back to my parents, who would no doubt laugh at me good-naturedly, feed me a hearty dinner, and drive me back the next day. Mostly it was having to explain how much of a non-story it was. Simply put, I was too late.

When the agent finally turned back to my booth, she started.

"Huh. It gave you one. On the ten. It assigned you a seat and everything."

I strongly suspect that I should thank my dad and his multisyllabic level of of frequent flyer status. I even got in the carpeted and, more importantly, short security line and everything. Booyah!

The only mar was that there were zero other wome in sight, either fore or aft. At first I doggedly set my cap on contributing to future proof otherwise. Then everything got complicated: what did a symbol like frequent flyer status mean anyway? Did I want to legitimize the rat race by shooting for its symptoms rather than its causes?

In the end I leave this zero-sum game for the academic feminists, 'cause I'm going! To France!

Language status: One of the announcements on board came in a rapid-fire, static-y French and I was kind of alarmed to realize that I understood none of it. When the paragraph was over the whole thing was repeated in English and I realized that I didn't understand that , either.

The pilot made his welcome first in a warm, midwestern newscaster accent and then proceeded to read off a rote translation in a seventh-grade stumble. He closed with, "I apologize for massacring your language, but I assure you I can pilot planes much better than I can speak French!"