Federal Disability Retirement: The vibrancy factor

There is much talk these days about energy, vibrancy, health and stamina; what defines it, that which best represents it, and to whom we attribute the importance of superficial concerns. This is an age of appearances, and it has been now for many decades. We still hear talk about the disjunctive opinions embracing the first televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon – how, for those who viewed it, the former “looked good” and the latter appeared “drawn and shady”, with dark shadows under shifty eyes in contrast to the well-tanned presentation of the former. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The perfection of nothingness

The advantage of nothingness over the clutter of everything is that the former – despite lacking any characteristic of anything concrete, or perhaps because of it – retains and reflects an aura of perfection. It is perhaps a puzzle to consider perfection in that which represents vacuity, but think about it: It is the figment and filament of negation which can represent the penultimate artifice of unsullied brightness; everything that is in being, can be found fault with, but nothing that exists cannot be prosecuted for imperfection. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement under FERS or CSRS: “The End”

Those two words are often appended upon the last word, the final thought, the grammatical period marking the denouement of a narrative; sometimes, an ellipsis leaving the reader to ponder a missing word, concept or continuation of an event. Why it is not stamped in bold print at the end of a biography or a non-fiction narrative; or even a short story, an essay or a philosophical treatise; perhaps, as a factual account presupposes a reflection of correspondence between truth and reality, it is only in the literary world of make-believe […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: Relevant subjects and relating back

Is it merely a ploy?  Are all subjects discussed in order to get to the point of addressing the subject of disability retirement for Federal employees and U.S. Postal Workers?  Some might wonder; yet, from the perspective of this attorney, the answer is quite simple:  Having a medical condition, and the resulting need to prepare an effective Federal Disability Retirement application to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is reflective of life’s multi-variegated challenges on a wider cosmic scale.  We tend to compartmentalize the trials and obstructions encountered; to say of this bump in the road, […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Medical Retirement: Myths of our own making

What stories we carry within our own heads; the narrative of our own lives, as well as the intersecting conveyances brought by others; the web of linguistic larcenies borrowed, bought and sometimes sold, become who we are and the essence of our being within the world of our phenomenology of existence. Sometimes, when a lie is told and the piece of puzzle will no longer fit into the greater collage of the manifold tapestry we carry about within our psyche, a rearrangement of sorts must occur. Perhaps, we discovered, through correspondence and other confirming […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Government Employment: Of Karl Popper’s ‘World 3’

Karl Popper’s division of the world into three clean segments of definable universes was, on the one hand, quite controversial — especially as the esoteric world of philosophy had been steadily ‘progressing‘ towards pure materialism and scientism; and yet, on the other, self-evident to almost a simplistic, tautological fault. Perhaps that is the very implication of profundity: it is that which appears so basic and elementary as to presuppose idiocy, but containing such inherent complexity as to remain beyond the reach of most. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Necessary steps to take in an unserious age

Adding the prefix implies that, beyond altering the root word, its conceptual opposite existed in a time prior to modernity and the present discourse of silliness. The addition denotes a moment of opposition, where lack of substance occurred and the negation of irrelevance prevailed; and now we are left with a word which connotes a denial of that for which we yearn. Every age has its follies; some epochs of upheavals are mere potholes in the history of revolutions and uneventful hiccups barely mentioned in those thick books which purportedly analyze decades, centuries and civilizations risen and fallen; […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Of the Charmed, Charted or Chartered Life

Of the troika of possibilities presented, the first is rarely available or even an option, if by a “charmed life” is defined as one where wealth is never a restrictive element, potentiality is ever compensated by unlimited resource, and freedom to choose — whether an unproductive, leisurely lifestyle or one which mixes pleasure with some semblance of “doing something” — is but a whim of desire and utterance of a command. Few of us have this option. As for the second — of a charted life, where cultural conventions, societal norms and limited possibilities structurally imposed by birth, circumstance and family lineage […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Service: Profiles in Discourage

It is, of course, an obvious play off of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize winning work (publication date of 1955), describing 8 U.S. Senators who displayed courage in the face of criticism (an inherent oxymoron?). Whether or not, and to what extent, Kennedy himself wrote the work (Ted Sorenson, John F.’s speechwriter, finally conceded in his 2008 autobiography as much) has become historically irrelevant, for the legend has become the man, and has replaced the truth of clear lines that once constituted the demarcation between fantasy and reality. […] Read More …