Federal Disability Retirement: As life passes by

It seems to come and go imperceptibly; we barely notice; then, one day, we wake up and life has passed by; the past is now an elongated prism through which we judge the remainder of our lives; the present is but the despair we feel because of wasted time allowed to blur beyond into a vestige of forgotten winds; […] Read More …

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: Those rare, insightful moments

Must it always reach the level of an epiphany, or may it be as a passing point of fluctuating comprehension? Every now and then, it is like the proverbial entrance into a clearing amidst the darkness of a looming forest; of a light that shines into a chasm heretofore undiscovered; and in that flash of understanding, it is important to grasp it, to tackle the concept, to concretize and declare, lest it slip silently away like the silken tail of a snake slithering into the tall grass. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: The Abridged Joyce

The extraction and extinguishment is done by unnamed others, sometimes in teams of unknown quantities, and certainly of dubious qualification of insight. In a similar vein, writers have always complained of the artistic ineptitude of editors, and editors of the quaint verbosity detracting from the plot, narrative and captivating flow missed by writers in pursuit of “Art”; but is there ever a “middle ground” when it comes to the integrity of the soul? But how can you cut away the content of the work, when the process itself is part and parcel of the substantive construct of the whole itself? […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Service: The cultural compass

The aggregate of knowledge as amassed by any given society does not constitute a unique culture, identifiable as distinct from all others; otherwise, as general knowledge is disseminated throughout and across national and international zones of distinguishing features, all cultures would remain the same. Culture precedes knowledge, and is the driving force which specifies the direction of it. The relevance; the choice between what is accepted and subsumed; the normative constraints and demarcations which preserve the very distinctiveness of any given culture; these are what focuses the idiosyncrasies of the preserve. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: An Inventory of One

Throughout life, whether by force of habit or necessity of accumulated overstock of items amassed, shelves forgotten and goods remaining unpopular despite an overzealous belief in them “at the time”, we need to take an inventory of our “store”, whether concerning possessions, beliefs, relationships or business endeavors. Inventories are difficult tasks; they remind us of the lack we possess, and the oversupply of that which we do not need. Shelves of emotional overloads mirror the abundance of false confidence we placed in something; and lack of characteristic comforts tell of a narrative of avoidance, […] Read More …

OPM Federal Disability Retirement: The Happy Warrior

The linguistic implications are multiple and rich in historical nuances, derived not merely from the combination of words but because of images from the past and residual connotations not always agreed upon but nevertheless trailing like appendages holding on for dear life to a departing conveyor of thoughts, ideas and characters.  It evokes caricatures of contrasting conditions of smiling in the face of adversity; of taking on opponents on the proverbial field of battle despite unwinnable odds, […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: The Wake-up Call

It can be requested pursuant to a prior arrangement or, with today’s technology, prewired on one’s own electronic device. Time was when there existed an employed switchboard operator sitting in front of a pock-marked surface deftly inserting plugs of a dozen or more connections simultaneously, like an octopus whose coordinated extremities swirl about under and over with cross-purposed entanglements, pulling and inserting, with headphones half dangling, calmly stating, “This is your wakeup call. Have a good morning!” […] Read More …

OPM Disability: Those Winds of Change That Portend to Pretend Promises

Change is an inevitable circumstance of life; it is what we seek when we are discontented; what we demand when threatened; and of which we fear, when least we expected it. For Plato and Aristotle, the puzzle of life and the winds of change had precursors who, in the tradition of ancestral doomsayers, declared the natural corollaries reflecting discontent, despair and fear, as represented by Heraclitus and Parmenides. […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement Lawyer: Life’s Series of Decisions

As activity is the fingerprint of life, and inertia denotes death (or at least a somnolence of sluggishness), so the parallelism between thought and life follows the logic of movement versus progressive decomposition. Thinking, according to Aristotelian tradition, constitutes the essence of human-ness. Other species may have characteristics which define and distinguish; for the human animal, it is the process of thinking, or thought-engagement, which differentiates and identifies by uniqueness of quality. Part of that cognitive process involves decision-making. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Of Camels and Corsets

Both represent anachronisms in our modern, technological society; the former as still somewhat distant and antiquated, with images of pyramids and times of colonialism; the latter of a time when the secrets of the body were hidden by shame, left to lust and imagination. They no longer fit into the common usage of everyday language games, whether because of being relegated to uncommon reference or to irrelevance. […] Read More …