Disability Retirement under FERS & CSRS: The character of each day

What does the day bring?  Do we awaken, put our finger up to the winds of time or the breeze of the day and ask that question before getting up, dressing and opening the door into a world beyond that may or may not fulfill the promises we believe to be granted?  Or, regardless of the indications, the barometers that forewarn or the compass that fails to direct, do we nevertheless move forward and tackle the challenges faced or otherwise deliberately and willfully avoid? […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Ascribing wrong motives

Is it wrong to ascribe wrong motives? And, unless there emerges practical consequences, does it matter? If a non-family member forms a relationship of friendship with an older person, do we fairly ascribe an underlying intent of malicious deliberation? We may think thus: He is hoping to gain something – gifts in return; an inheritance, perhaps; or, maybe even a more blatant act of stealing or forcibly engaging in a criminal enterprise. On the other hand, there could be a purity of motives – of responding to loneliness and a desire for company; but who in this world ever believes that, anymore? […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Gov. Employment: Degree versus knowledge

Does a degree hold as much worth, if everyone possesses one? Why are the economics of supply and demand not attached to degrees conferred by so-called institutions of “higher learning”? Is the degree conferred of value because of the opportunities granted by the elevated status, or by the knowledge gained and imparted? Or is the disjunctive bifurcation into universes of counterparts, between diploma represented as opposed to a jewelry box of wisdom, an offer of false alternatives, when some may indeed gain knowledge […] Read More …

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: Afterwards

There is often a sense of deflated incompleteness; of a sense that what comes next is not as fulfilling as the expectation of that which has already passed. The sense of “let-down” is a phenomena which exists only in a culture which prepares for much, allows for little, and demands of everything. For the Federal employee and the U.S. Postal worker who expected that a career in the Federal sector or the U.S. Postal Service meant a lifetime of dedicated service, and that loyalty would include a bilateral venue where, if you became ill, […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: The Demarcation between Sanity and…

The dividing line itself may be a false option; for, there may well exist a spectrum of alternatives prior to falling off of the fathomless cliff into the netherworld of the opposite. Yet, human behavior often reveals to us the tenuous hold we have upon this thin reed we identify as the “civilized” world, where conformity to standards of behavior are relatively followed, and the social contract between citizens constrains open aggression towards one another; and from the individual’s viewpoint, the internal mechanism of orderliness remains fairly intact. […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement Lawyer: The Complexity of Unpredictability

Some view human behavioral unpredictability as a declaration of the underlying complexity; others would have it that, far from any such convoluted aspiration towards mystery and intricacy, a yawn and ensuing boredom more likely represents the determinism and simplicity of humans.  Which represents the true picture? […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: The Blank Canvas

For a painter, it is either the sight of uncontrollable delight, or a subtle sense of foreboding into depths of despondency; for the blank canvas represents two sides of a single coin: an opportunity to do what one can, or the beginning of that which may be rejected by an unappreciative public eye. But that is the inherent anomaly of every opportunity presented: potential success, or possible failure. That is why we carry around within us quips of self-appeasement, in order to lessen the weight of expected shortcomings: “Nothing gained, nothing lost”; “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all”; the list of 100 successful people who failed at first; and other proverbial self-motivators. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Foreign Lands

There was a time when foreign lands had a sense of the exotic and prohibitive; but in a shrinking world, where technology brings images of distant scenery into homes and living rooms “as if” time and geographical dissonance matters not; and where virtual reality and computer graphics crosses the bifurcated worlds of fantasy and reality; today, it is the native who finds that being a foreigner in one’s own country is far more common than merely the inability to communicate  effectively in a different tongue. […] Read More …

Federal OPM Disability Retirement Lawyer: The Scent of Decay

Animals steer clear of it; the growing stench is a warning, a harbinger for the wary; it is only an attraction to vultures and other scavenging birds of prey; civilized societies deal with it by slapping an FDA food label on items, long before the bacteria of decomposition begins to cannibalize and self-immolate. The reality of the olfactory response is to curl up one’s nostrils; the metaphor encapsulates the recognition of weakness and vulnerability, and the herd mentality of attacking the weakest in the evolutionary race of disseminating one’s greater gene pool by diminishing the population of the weak, thus providing a justifying basis for extermination and dominance. […] Read More …