Spirit Airlines

 As chronicled on Jeopardy, Trevor Noah has a bit that he goes back to time and time again in his skits, especially on the Daily Show (back when Trevor Noah hosted the Daily Show and spawned the phrase "Na mean?" mean "You know what I mean?" which MJ and I have adapted in our daily conversation. Good times. Having never flown Spirit Airlines (I know, surprising, given my history of being a tightwad and trying to save as much as I could on any purchases and going with the lowest quality product) but I can just imagine what it would have been like and the type of people on those flights.... pure chaos. So at the end of the Spirit Airlines era (it went public in 2011, about when I started investing, and got all the way up to $85 dollars in 2014, indicating there was some promise the company would become a major player in the low-cost airline industry), and then cratered and is trading at $0.69 per share today. Just another reason not to dabble in airline stocks, despite United, American and Delta all having big stock market years..... the year to year volatility is huge and it's frankly just hard to run an airline, huge overhead, have to pay the pilots, the workers, order the planes.......if there's one industry I wouldn't want to become an owner of, it's airlines. Fun fact: I once owned Jet Blue stock (JBLU), one of my first stock purchases.... and the stock is trading almost exactly the same price as it did in 2010 when I first started investing, while inflation has increased more than 45%. 

It's probably hard for people to have nostalgia about plane trips, but there are some plane rides from my childhood that I felt alive, emboldened, or just had a really good memory. Maybe it's because they used to have full meals on planes that were not necessarily better but different from my parents' cooking, I sometimes craved going on planes to see what food I would get (Chicken or fish was a big decision for me back then!) and looking out the window at the clouds, taking off from the airport, and admiring all the busy-looking adults looking important and business-like (come to realize now that they were just slaving away at their jobs or trying to handle 3 kids on a cross-country flight, no easy task on its own) and boy oh boy, I was so excited to know what the flight movie was! Yup, that's right, back then there was just ONE movie for everyone to see on the plane, and the pilot announced it at the beginning of the flight. Like it or not, that's the one you were stuck with watching, no matter if you were a kid, liked cartoons, rom-coms, or Friends re-runs. Oh but I enjoyed those movies. 

Yesterday also marked my 23rd anniversary of coming to America, landing in America on December 13, 1991 (a George H.W. Bush kid!) Hundreds of flights later, I'm a veteran of planes and am just trying to get through from place to place as quickly as possible, but when I was 4 and a half years ago I was full of wonder, what this plane thing was, why my stomach feels so weird, why we had to switch planes in the middle (changed in either SFO or Vancouver, I forget) and whatever happens, follow my grandpa. My grandpa was as old as my parents are now, that's how the grains of time have shifted. I crave that feeling now, of adventure, youthful exuberance, not knowing what's going to happen next but being excited about the day, not knowing exactly where the plane was headed (somewhere called Chicago? I just knew it wasn't Shanghai where my relatives had sent me off) but satisfied that I had a destination, and that destination would have food and soccer ball chocolate candy. Now I can see my road map to my death, and it has some exciting things on its path but it's not nearly as mysterious and ignorantly blissful as I was on that plane coming to America. I didn't fly on Spirit Airlines; I had spirit on that airline. (I know, bad pun, but I tried).