Flight Path News

There’s not really much to do in Metairie. But once I moved to New Orleans, a whole world opened up! There are just always things to do in New Orleans.  I spent my first few years of age exploring and falling down in the French Quarter and Bourbon Street. I have since refined my tastes to be a little more targeted. Particularly, I love the Garden District. Small restaurants, cafes, boutiques, and endless walking around space.

Every so often, I’ll make my way over to Frenchman Street to check out local music and the art market. But when that happens, I usually end up imbibing too much and making questionable choices with the trajectory of my evening. To that effect, I try to reserve nights like this for when I have out-of-towners or dates.

I’m also quite fond of the Lafitte swamps and while I would love to go out there on my own and take my boat out, I don’t have a boat. I usually just watch the groupon deals for a swamp tour and do that when I have guests. People lose their shit over alligators. I’ll also do this with the kids we’re representing once in a while. They should know how big their world really is!

And finally, there are so very many celebrity-cheffed restaurants in New Orleans that I love to try. I won’t even wait for accompaniment for these. I like to go eat meals on my own. There’s something really calming about it.

Now I’m much more responsible about my money, my time, my travel. I understand so much more now that I needn’t leave the country to find adventure. There are so many cool trips around Louisiana – even just the swamps of Louisiana, the gulf of Mississippi, the mountains and honky tonks of Tennessee, etc.  I spent about twenty-five years ignoring some very cool local attractions.

My favorite place to visit is Asheville, North Carolina. In the middle of conservative “southern” North Carolina, there exists this little New Age Mecca city for arts and women and inclusivity and microbreweries and art and happiness.  People just feel at ease there. There is always something to do, see or participate in. The Blue Ridge Parkway runs right through it, so it’s scenic and popular.

There’s so much live music whether in clubs, concert venues or beautiful summer festivals.  There’s always street performance and outdoor music to be found.  And it attracts most of the big name acts coming through the region.

Oh! And Nina Simone is from Asheville!

I used to be quite the avid traveler. I travelled to five continents (North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia) before I even finished college. But I had never been to California. It dawned on me when I was about 23 how much money I’d spent leaving the country without ever having exhausted the travel opportunities within the Americas.  Since then I’ve made a point to get out of Louisiana at least four times a year.

I grew up in North America, no cool story about my travels TO North America. Nor are there any cool stories about my travel WITHIN North America for the first half of my life.  To offer perspective, I had left Louisiana plenty of times in my twenties, but only to leave the country.

I went to South America when I was 20 and there was a January term study trip to Ecuador. I honestly don’t even remember the *premise* of the educational part of the trip. It was pretty much just a three-week party for which I got some art credits.

Asia was even less planned out. I was dating a Japanese-American woman for about two months when her grandmother in Kyoto passed away. She very weepily asked me to accompany her to the funeral and while my brain was screaming TOO EARLY TOO EARLY, I obliged and we had a terrible time. Turns out, travelling with a new significant other can be very challenging, especially if there’s going through some very loud and dramatic mourning about a woman they’ve (nor you’ve) ever actually met.

I was just about to graduate from college when my roommate decided he was going to spend the summer in Australia. I didn’t have a job lined up yet, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was already tens of thousands of dollars in student debt so I figured…. now or never.  We rented a little rv van/bus thing and drove around the country for about three months having the best time. It was the best, freest, happiest time of my life. Paying off those loans – still to this day – feels very worth it.

I have hobbies. While I work hard and often, I unwind hard and less often. I like to make small films and photographs, mainly of nature and my nephews/nieces to post to my Instagram page. After a long day in court trying to make a judge acknowledge that a child is a human, or watching maps and clearance patterns so that I can get people home safely, I like to set up my tripod in my yard and spend three hours filming a slug only to lapse it into a 30-second video of a moving slug. It’s a nice calming reminder that no matter what I do and no matter how hard I work, biological life goes on however it must to survive.

And I’ll admit that the number of “likes” I get on a post does help me determine what to post more.

I also like different kinds of fitness. Lately I’ve been doing Muy Thai – a Thai kickboxing practice – which allows me to stay fit, meet people, and be active. Last week though, I caught a thumb in my left eye and have been sporting a pretty sexy (?) shiner since. Although, the girl I met a week before this accident seemed to find it kinda sexy. So maybe that’s working against my clean cut image? In a good way.

For a while I was even helping a local company provide pool service in Gulfport, MS. Not exactly what I would call a hobby, but something about using the net to pick up all the floating pine straw helps me relax.

I forgot I wanted to make this blog about flying too. When I’m not working in child injury advocacy, I am an air traffic controller. Yup! Just like the guy in Breaking Bad, but I’m much better at it, so far. The gist of this is that I work on the ground through a controlled airspace providing advisory services to aircraft in non-controlled airspace. So I spend a lot of time saying, “you’re clear to proceed to gate #.”

My preferred role in air traffic controls is through tower control, responsibility for the active runway surfaces.  I clear aircrafts for take=off and landing and ensure that the prescribed runway separation always exists.  So if you’re ever sitting on a plane waiting for a gate, know that someone like me is sitting in a tower making sure that you get a gate, but that it’s safe for everyone on your plane as well as all of the other planes at the airport.  This is a good fit for me because while it allows me to use my analytic brain and conduct work through ha series of logical steps and conclusions, it doesn’t allow much for big disastrous mistakes like the one in Breaking Bad which was caused by a mid-air collision due to an air traffic controller on zero sleep and reeling from the death of his daughter.

For what it’s worth, my airport requires leaves of absence for any air traffic controllers experiencing a similar trauma or upsetting life event. Besides traffic and weather, air traffic control problems are the next cause of air traffic disasters – in my opinion. I wouldn’t want anyone doing the job who could possibly disagree with me.

While I practice primarily in Louisiana, I have found myself occasionally pulled into cases in Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas. I like exploring different state law and working to ensure that children are protected regardless of their address.  Many of these children have been floating through the Southeast region of the United States since their birth, staying with family members and neighbors for years long before the state stepped in. I don’t want these kids to be disadvantaged based solely on where they landed.

I have my licensure in Louisiana, so I don’t directly represent the kids in these other states (yet) but I work with legal practices in these states as a “child advocate” rather than attorney. Sometimes these kids just need a familiar face throughout the proceedings, so I try to provide that.

I also work with my organization to find adequate state-based legal representation for these children so that they’re not (always) appointed an unworthy state attorney to barely represent them to the best of their limited ability. No offense to these hard-working individuals, but children need extra care and attention that is no always allowable within their schedules.

My organization also works to ensure funding for these children.

I usually look for firms run by family members, first and foremost, simply because my belief is that if a law firm is marketing itself on being a family business, they may have more patience and attention to pay to children.  This is why I work very closely with who I believe are Mississippi’s best personal injury lawyers.

When I tell people I work in personal injury law, I sometimes get a side-eye as though I’m some opportunistic leech tracking down injured people and billing people for their injury. This is certainly how my career started out, but as time went on and I felt less and less contributive to society, I pivoted. It turns out that children – including those being represented by the state – can sustain injuries at the fault of others and they deserve representation and advocacy as much as anyone else.

Some interesting information to consider:

• In many states, children cannot file their own personal injury lawsuits meaning it usually becomes the responsibility of the parent. If the child, however, is parentless or in the custody of a non-parent legal guardian, it becomes a little more challenging. This is not to say that there aren’t great legal guardians out there protecting the interest of the children in their care. But for every one of these lucky kids, there are many who have a legal guardian who is trying as hard as they can but cannot possibly take on a legal case.
• The laws regarding trespassing and property responsibility is different with children – and differs by state – insomuch that if a child is injured on property that they did not have permission to be on, they are probably considered trespassing. This means the owner of that property is likely not considered responsible for the injury.
• However, child negligence (including those negligent to the notion of trespassing) is determined by the age of the child and how this represents their ability to reasonably behave. This is a state-by-state designation.
• Because children are still being molded and influenced, there many factors to consider in a child’s injury case including disfigurement, pain/suffering and mental stress/trauma. These are all important considerations when requesting injury compensation.
• In most states, the court will appoint a guardian to represent the child’s best interest depending on the amount of compensation. This is where I come in. While children’s have the same rights as adults to receive injury compensation when the injury is caused by the action/lack of action of others, the age of the child, circumstances of the injury, and legal standing of the child may complicate things.  I have experience with children’s cases and injury law to fight for each child “in the system” to get full compensation owed to him.

It is oft forgotten that children matter and deserve advocacy, that this blows my mind is understating my disgust with some sections of humanity.  Children need and deserve more than to simply survive, they need opportunities to thrive and love and learn and grow. They deserve dignity, respect, and opportunities. Regardless of the circumstances of their lifestyles, families and socio-economic advantage or disadvantage. The 100 children in the ‘system’ at any time in this county deserve advocacy.

To take children out of family situations denying these rights only to put them into a system that continues to deny them is nonsense, pointless and a misuse of governmental funds. But to do nothing at all contributes to abuse and neglect. My position is that regular citizens, volunteers, trained to assure the rights and needs of these children, can do so much to improve their quality of life and provide them with opportunities.

The political and socioeconomic climate of our country today did not happen suddenly, it happened because of so many years of hatred, neglect, and ignorance. Children all over our country deserved advocacy, got none, and in so many cases had no options in their lives. Not only does this mean many of these children miss out on basic privileges of growing up in America, but creates a culture of angry, neglected, adults.

Never forget: children that we ignore as children still, in most cases, become adults. Adults are a little harder to ignore.