OWCP benefits & OPM Disability Retirement: Empathy and pain

“I feel your pain” has become a declaration of empathetic character in modernity; but whether born of sincerity or from political expediency, one can never know, precisely because empathy as a subjective phenomena is just as elusive as pain itself remains. How does one assess or judge, evaluate or analyze, confirm or conclude with any amount of certainty, the extent, severity, reality or even of simple existence of that which is subjective by definition?  Pain, like one’s motive, falls within the realm of a person’s own experiential declaration, […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement Representation: The pecking order

Watching birds fly and cavort around a bird-feeder, one realizes that the term as applied to human conduct is not too far from the reality of the natural order of things.  There is, indeed, a “pecking order” in the world of birds and fowls aflight; it has to do with size, aggression, quickness and desire to survive. In other words, how birds behave is not too far afield from the way in which humans interact. […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement: Forgetting for a moment

It is a game we play, or perhaps “have to” in order to retain our fantasy-world and “pretend” selves. We like to think that we gave up, long ago, those childish dreams and fantasies we engaged and tolerated as younger selves, and that as adults we must daily face the realities of problems encountered, difficulties arisen and turmoil challenged.  But we haven’t.  We have merely replaced it with another, more productive methodology of play-acting: Forgetting, for the moment. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Nascent knowledge

At what point does nascence become a maturity of device? Is it linear time, or merely to exist within a pendulum of boredom where thoughts have moved on to other matters? Youth, in general, is expected to engage in folly; but of nascent knowledge, where the appended concept of the latter connotes an established fact, a truism tested, and a hypothesis verified – but yet to be tested by time-worn principles and assimilated into the cauldron of society’s greater mixture of things working, defects allowable, and warts acknowledged as harmless. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement Benefits: That oppressive air

There are circumstances in life when the environment becomes so intolerable, that one just has an inkling to “chuck it all” and walk away. Fortunately, the human animal possesses a measure of self-discipline and restraint; although, looking at the excesses of the world around us, one would never know it. If you watch and read the news, one would logically conclude that the world around us is falling apart and disintegrating at the seams. If you hermetically seal one’s life and shut down all communication devices, happiness may well abound in the bliss of ignorance, but you will be deemed to be either mad or uncouth. That is, in fact, what the ad agencies wanted us to believe, wasn’t it? […] Read More …