Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Owning a landline

It is perhaps the single telling factor of a generational divide; if you own a landline, it is likely you are not a millennial.  Or from the generation just before, or even the one before that.  You are probably from the generation sometime within the timeframe of “just after” the Korean War and around the end of the Vietnam War.  It is the remembrance of unreliable “bag” phones and cellular connections that barely became audible; but more than that, it is the evidence of who one is based upon the generational divide […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement: The noisy neighborhood

It is the collective organism reflecting the individual, somewhat like the tripartite division of Plato’s theory of the soul; the neighborhood, filled with noises differentiated by weekdays, Fridays and weekends, reflects the character of the separate families who congregate to make up the entirety.  And, like Plato’s argument against appearances versus the reality of the essence of a thing, the façade of a neighborhood – the architectural structures, the number of bedrooms in each, the style of the roofs and the slope, […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: The Happiness Goal

Whether human happiness is the goal to strive for, or as a byproduct to savor in those moments of sudden revelation, is for each individual to ascertain and abide by.  One can study the sages and philosophers and realize that there is a distinction to be made between joy and happiness, of contentment and satisfaction, and from a sense of peace as opposed to the turmoil of anxious foreboding. […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement: Obligation through Declaration

It is through the vehicle of the declarative statement that obligations are created. Thus, when one states: “I promise…”; “I will…”; “You can count on me…”; and other similar declarations of intent, then the connection between the speaker and the one to whom it is stated, is immediately created, such that a binding sense of mandatory indebtedness is established. In many ways, then, it is through the spoken word, arranged in a pre-established sequence of grammatical form, which constitutes something beyond a mere folly of ideas, […] Read More …