Miscellaneous

OPM Disability Retirement: A break from the quotidian

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Is there ever a release from the commonplace? We take it so for granted – those mundane occurrences of daily living – until the greater pain of life’s misgivings overwhelm and supersede. The quotidian is a fancy term for the everyday; that routine which we engage in from the moment our eyes open, the sleepiness is cast aside, and the feet are sheathed into slippers or socks, or perhaps not at all; and all that was just described, as well, constitutes the quotidian. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Implicit Questions

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In many questions, there are multiple sub-questions. Take, for example, the question: Why are you so tired? You may respond first by answering the unasked but implicit question by declaring: “But I am not tired”. That is not what the question asked. Such an answer is a response to the implied question within the question, of: “Are you tired?” To the question actually asked, the proper response might be: I stayed up late last night reading. The presumptive sub-question unstated and silent but implicit in the major question posited in duality of a contingent combination, is precisely what is often termed as “lawyerly”, and thus somehow deceitful, tricky and attempting to subvert by having the responder accept a non-explicit presumption of facts. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The din of silence

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They are opposites, and yet they can confer meaning and communicate conceptual clarity by the very usage of simultaneous reflection in conjoined placement within a singular sentence of repose. Can silence be of such tumultuous unnerving, and a confusion of loud noises be characterized within the context of its opposite, and still retain a clear sense of meaning? Would it make the similar, mirror-image sense if we transposed and flipped those same words, and instead spoke about the “silence of din”? […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: And then we die

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(It is the parenthetical previous statement that ultimately matters, left blank to be completed, and never to be presumed). Actions of finality, or seemingly so, tend to create an aura of despair and angst. Once, in a world where purpose was never questioned, and the teleological end of man never brought forth the hint of doubt, the cohesiveness of society’s resolve was never a pause. It is the modernity of hesitation, trepidation and loss of judgment that brings us to the pit of incessant questioning, as opposed to “doing”. This is a maddening world, where the rise of Existentialism and post-modern impotence leaves us to seek therapy at every turn. […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Deferred hope unrealized

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Hope is a necessary component to life. When one is born, there are rarely instructional manuals which accompany the organic package of severed umbilical cord, amniotic fluid, blood and plasma formed by hydrostatic forces beyond ordinary knowledge or wisdom; the entity appears, and we are left to our own devices. But “life” cannot exist in a vacuum, though we are forged by admonitions that the tough road ahead should be traveled with fortitude, “rugged individualism” (whatever that is), and independence tantamount to abandonment. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Tethered, Tattered & Tortured

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The first in the series connotes bonding; the second, the state of being; and the third in the tripartite application of this linguistic artifice, the conclusion to a life lived. Camus and Sartre represent the despair and loss of innocence – of a melancholy realization in the disillusionment of life’s aggregate experience – born in the early days of existentialism which uttered its first breath of strangulated gasps in the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, only to be reinforced with experiential encounters of greater dehumanization during the Second World War; […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Rhymeless Poems

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When did it happen? Certainly, by the time E.E. Cummings came upon the scene, with his oddity of typographical stream of consciousness, the acceptance of it had already come to fruition; or, perhaps it was in the translation of foreign such vehicles of linguistic amalgamations – when the first frustrated translator threw up his hands in disgust at a Japanese Haiku or a German verse of too numerous a compendium of throat-clearing consonants, that the advent of the rhymeless poem reached its fulfillment and pinnacle of public acceptance. Or, maybe we just ran out of words. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Casuistry and Sophistry

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It is often used to described “applied” ethics — that branch of moral questioning which evaluates and analyzes an actual case, as opposed to a theoretical artifice constructed for purely pedagogic purposes, devoid of flesh and substantive import. No longer constrained by the ivory tower of hypothetical unversality, and thus vacuous of feeling, real empathy and true relationships, casuistry naturally devolves into sophistry, where self-interested motives become ensconced. Devolution denotes a denigration of sorts; such a statement is not deliberate in its alliterative force, […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Cavalier extinctions

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We focus much on lost species, forever erased at a rate of untold apocryphal dimensions, as if the deletion of undiscovered DNA material might never be recovered, and thus for once, we worry about things which we have never known ascribed as that which “could” have saved us from our own extinguishment, all the while ignoring the plight of human detritus all around us. We do that with fading civilizations, too, don’t we? We argue for egalitarianism, impartiality, and for all things being of equivalency in value and worth; […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: The Abridged Joyce

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The extraction and extinguishment is done by unnamed others, sometimes in teams of unknown quantities, and certainly of dubious qualification of insight. In a similar vein, writers have always complained of the artistic ineptitude of editors, and editors of the quaint verbosity detracting from the plot, narrative and captivating flow missed by writers in pursuit of “Art”; but is there ever a “middle ground” when it comes to the integrity of the soul? But how can you cut away the content of the work, when the process itself is part and parcel of the substantive construct of the whole itself? […] Read More …