OPM Disability Retirement Benefits: The picture album

Time was, every family had a picture album – that anachronism bound carefully in a large leather book-shaped monstrosity, kept safe where dust settles and mice scurry around; taken out for occasions where boredom is accentuated and friends or neighbors have stayed long past their welcome, and so it is taken out carefully, dusted off and laboriously paged through, telling of a history for each page, each photograph laid meticulously upon the thick plaster-backboard of a person’s history. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement for Federal Employees: Poetry’s death

By the title is not meant the terminus of the literary genre; that would be too great a claim to consider. No; instead, it is the more subtle manner of thought, the perspective of viewing, and the approach to living. We live by metaphors and analogies; that is what the rise of language has accomplished, where the raw violence of predatory insights in nature’s setting of surviving could no longer tolerate, but where some amount of leisure, such little calculation of foresight, and a crumb of thoughtful reserve allowed for a world of mythological beauty. […] Read More …

Federal Employees Disability Retirement Systems (FERS/CSRS): Of the parsimonious panderer

Somehow, merely doing your work just isn’t good enough; allies must be accumulated; alliances must be forged; outsiders, enemies and loners must be harassed, intimidated and crucified; suspicion is always cast upon the forces of neutrality, and homage paid is the quid pro quo of worldly advantage. We tend to think that the manner in which prison systems naturally tend towards animalistic behavior of fiefdoms, savagery and community of gangs merely reflects a sociological consequence of a passing academic interest, without recognizing that the same applies in our daily lives. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Frustrated Purposes

The linear attempt is the methodology of direct purpose; it is the measurement of length — of a straight line from point A to point B, of a one-dimensional character. Any obstacle placed in its path represents a frustration of that purpose, and merely delays and obfuscates the attempt to accomplish a stated goal. How to ad lib in circumstances where obstacles appear; the consideration of options and alternatives in the face of detours and unexpected deterrences; what malleability of core values must be shown when necessity arises; these are all challenges within a universe of expectations otherwise untested. […] Read More …

FERS Disability Retirement: The key to happiness

There are countless titles of books which predicate upon the presumptuous endeavor; palm readers who, for a prepaid fee, make their living from it; and wanderers who trek the Himalayas in search of it.  Others merely change the definition or meaning of what constitutes the achieved goal, or drink themselves silly when self-deception fails to fulfill.  […] Read More …

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: The Future of Now

Human beings have the unlimited capacity of projecting into the future, such that a present picture of what may occur some time hence can be visualized; but whether and how many bring the future to the fore, such that the present becomes encompassed into the reflective reality of current circumstances, is of an imaginative rendering few take the time to engage in. By focusing upon the future as some ethereal fog somewhere in the distant netherworlds, we can justify the tendency to procrastinate and kick the proverbial can down the road; […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: The tapestry of modernity

Every age has its feel of fabric of the times; in ages past, the woven loom of quiet hamlets with curls of smoke slowly rising from the warmth of the hearth; in others, the tension wrought at the dawn of the industrial revolution, where the ways of old and the textiles of handiworks would soon be replaced by the machines of progress. In modernity, there is the tactile sense of restlessness, of communities splintered, where we are told that the inevitable march of progress is but for the dawn of an age of leisure, […] Read More …