Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: The clinical language

The antiseptic nature of language allows for the euphemism of linguistic cloaking to occur.  The corollary effect, however, is that it fails to provide a nexus to the humanity lost, and allows for an arrogance of language by imparting its distance and separation from warmth.  Clinical language has that characteristic, steeped in the mysterious and archaic history of Gregorian chants at altars once embodying the Eucharist’s theological secrets of transubstantiation with the priesthood undulating in phrases foreign to ears of modernity; […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Silent lives defying interpretation

Life is a mystery, and individual lives a puzzle untold.  It is the calluses that we develop throughout our lives that diminish our individual and collective curiosity to get to know the “other”.  We are born with a teleological intellect striving to unravel and unmask the depths of human essence; but modernity, technology and the singular focus of tangents often involving prurient asides distract and envelop with unwavering obsessions, but it has gotten worse:  […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Answering Questions

How do we come to learn how to do it?  Certainly, we come across certain eccentric individuals who defy every conventional norm, and somehow manage to appear as if they have done what otherwise we recognize as not having been completed. Have you ever come across someone who just isn’t “quite right” – such that, when you ask a question, the tangents that flood forth and the meandering thought processes make it an arbitrary conclusion as to whether it was the specific question asked that prompted the incommensurate response, or just the mere fact of a tonal posit of a question-like query that compelled a verbal reaction, even if it has nothing to do with the substance of the question itself? […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Preparing for more than a ‘maybe’

We never engage a project with just a ‘maybe’; to do so is to invite a preemptive failure, of sorts. On the other hand, there are rarely any guarantees in life; just as the victims of Madoff and other historical figures of thievery; a ‘sure thing’ is rarely that, and more likely its counterintuitive opposite. Chances and opportunities of a lifetime, of course, are touted as ‘maybes’ that should be considered. Those stories abound of youthful vigor in the parent’s basement tinkering with innovations that will alter the future course of technology and mechanized futuristic inventions; […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The New Year

Perhaps it is not merely an arbitrary demarcation, after all. It is around the time when the winter solstice reaches its pinnacle, and the days become lengthier, the nights shorter. The year following – the “new” year – begins its ascendancy, leaving behind the frigid desolation yet to endure. And the excesses of behavior – of drinking, celebration and abandonment of all societal decorum and convention? It is a way of expiating the pent-up constraints of self-discipline and customary resolve; a way to release the energy of social boundaries for a few hours, a fortnight, and a morning after without regret or remorse. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: The narrative we write

Each of us carries a narrative within; the David Copperfield segment of our otherwise unrevealed lives. It is who we are; the past that enlivens or diminishes; the memories of yesteryear or just a fortnight ago; and it resides continually until that day of atonement or the diminishment though dementia of fated unkindness. What we say; how it is written; how it is related through the handed-down oral traditions of storytelling and bemused tales of a Dickensian happy endings (excepting Little Nell and other debatable few unnamed); and how it is told, in what manner, with what punctuations and unctuous phraseology applied; these matter, especially when others are listening. […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: Exchanging pleasantries

Some possess the greater patience for it, and enthusiastically embrace the inherent gamesmanship and accompanying pleasures derived therefrom; while others merely forego even the most basic of such prefatory considerations and condescending patronization that commonly attaches. Still others mechanically, thoughtlessly and with automated responsiveness, emit the utterances with aplomb and a wave of hands, never pausing to even consider the discourteousness of violating that fragile sheen of neighborly discourse. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The party never thrown

It is the emptiness and void of what could have been, or even should have been; of regrets untold and remorse unuttered. Whether for a special celebration marking a person’s birthday or an event of magnified relevance; or a turning point in a person’s life – of a 10th anniversary, exceeding expectations of mortality, in waiting, or perhaps a common achievement by others in everyday living but for handicaps and disabilities that make it challenging to meet; whatever the event, the party never thrown for it magnifies a negation of recognition, and like a pinprick into the heart and soul of a person’s life, it deflates the very essence of joy. […] Read More …