Federal Disability Retirement: Just another bystander

There are primary characters, ancillary or peripheral personalities – and just another bystander.  Similarly, in personal relationships taken from a subjective “I” viewpoint, there are “close family members” (i.e., normally identified as the core within a nuclear family), “extended family”,  […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Government: The whiles of life

While I wait; while I watch; while I listen; while I suffer; these, and many more, are the wiles of life (note the sudden extraction of the “h” in the subtle – or not – alteration by omission). But such a linguistic subterfuge is appropriate, as it connotes a manipulative intention in the very wasting away of life’s gifts. For, indeed, we spend much of our days steeped in inactivity, waiting patiently while life passes by. While I wait in line; while I watch an advertisement; while the kids play; while the dog sniffs; the wiles of waiting, […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Of true discourse and debate

A title immediately becomes “suspect” when the prefatory insertion of the word “true” is necessitated. For, the noun which it is meant to enhance should be able to stand alone, without the reinforced embellishment that it is somehow more genuine than with the cousin’s uninvited presence. It is like referring to a gemstone as a “valuable emerald” (what, one queries, would constitute an invaluable one?), or that such-and-such is a “very religious priest” (as opposed to an irreligious one?); and so to refer to the methodological approach of discourse and debate as one which is “true”, is to immediately undermine the very meaning of such a beginning. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: The Coherent Life

Coherence fails to take into the account the unexpected; moreover, a linear, systematic unfolding of events is rarely the rule, but rather the exception. Look at nature and the traumatic tumult which follows daily — of predators and pendulums swinging between life and death, and the instability of future courses yet to be determined. What do we make of it all? Kant would posit that we bring to the objective world structural viewpoints in order to bring order into a chaotic world; but is rationality seen from within of any greater coherence than a world unfettered by human perspective? […] Read More …