OPM Disability under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset: To Fly a Kite

It is the epitome of a pleasurable moment, of engaging a mindless activity which spurs thought; and so to fly a kite is to soar with winds beyond our reach. Does a life lived vicariously live life lifelessly? As the flapping breeze at heights unreachable carries it airborne with but a thread to preclude its sudden spiraling away and into an abyss of telephone wires, treetops and treacherous heights of threatening snags, it is that hand which holds steady the coil of connection which controls length, movement, and steadiness of stability. […]

 
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Federal Disability Retirement: Peripheral Vision

Something catches one’s notice; perhaps an odd movement, a dotted color scheme of minute origins and insignificant except in contrast to the toneless surroundings; or, because of a survival instinct still active from a forgotten history of evolutionary need, a signal of caution that danger may be lurking.  The eyes shift; the attempt to focus upon that which was noticed through one’s peripheral vision, is suddenly lost forever. […] Read More …

Postal & Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: Beyond the Efficacy of Advice

There comes a point where the tripartite intersection between factual urgency, advice, and the receptiveness to such advisory delineations, becomes a futile act of inertia. Facts are often self-evident to most who seek to view and understand them; advice, based upon the facts as presented, is rarely profound or enlightening, and quite often merely states the obvious, based upon the facts as perceived; but it is the problematic venue of the one to whom advice is given, where negation of due consideration and persistence in intractable stubbornness betrays the efficacy of the first two prefatory components. […]

 
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OPM Medical Retirement: The Bygone Era of the Single Photograph

It sits upon a private pedestal, prominent for its centrality and foundational focus; it is that which lives are built upon, like the cornerstone which, if withdrawn, unravels the structural integrity and shatters the countenance of teleological significance. But with time, they fade; that which was thought to be timeless and withstanding of mortality, as with all things less than angels but stewards of God’s gifts; and the chemical admixtures which created the bright sheen in the first days thereafter, are now but fading glories of past experiences gathered through a lifetime of memories. […] Read More …

Expanding the Significance of Individual Federal Employee Disability Cases

Lawyers daily engage in it; courts are sometimes receptive to it; the public is rarely approving of it. Expanding the literal language of a statute by reading meaning into words, phrases and conceptual paradigms not otherwise manifested or obvious in the words enacted, is a language game which some call intellectual brilliance, while others deem to be disingenuous or otherwise dishonest, to be blunt about it. The “it”, of course, is the compendium of the expanded impact and relevance of consequences resulting from statutory language, some intended, others unintended. […]

 
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FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The Purposeful Statement

Some narratives are written for the pure beauty of style and art; quiet in tenor, like the bamboo hollow whistling in the serenity of a morning breeze as the sun reaches the crest of the distant mountains, the place where wizards and warlords gather in solemn conferences around a fireplace of cooling ashes. Then, there are informational pieces — direct lines of communication, shot at the reader like an arrow and with words to pierce the intended audience. […] Read More …

FERS Disability Retirement: External-Internal Linkage

Thoreau’s observation that the mass of men lead “lives of quiet desperation” holds a profound place in daily acquiescence to the stresses of modernity; the influence and linkage between the internal workings of biology, psychology and the interplay upon health and wellbeing, and the greater macro-impact from the inevitable encounters with the external, […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: Of Capillary Constancy

Capillaries represent the smallest of the body’s blood vessels, which cumulatively account for the greater part of the microcirculatory means of reaching extremities and body under-surfaces beyond the reach of major veins. Bursting or damaging a few here and there have little effect; cutting a capillary or bruising resulting from a blow to a branch of them, will have residual reverberations of unnoticed proportions.

 
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USPS & OPM Federal Employee Disability Retirement: One of Those Days

There are “those days”, so characterized because of the micro-calamities which, in their cumulative impact, disproportionately reveal a compendium of aggregated irritants amounting in totality to a forgetful epoch of one’s life. By contrast, a medical condition of an insidious nature, progressively deteriorating, chronic in persistence and debilitating in severity, magnifies tenfold — nay, a hundred, a thousand, […] Read More …