OPM Medical Retirement: Living “As If”

We all engage in it; it is a pastime, of sorts, which is enjoyed by the multitude, and reveals the imaginative capacity of the human animal, but with lingering questions concerning the evolutionary viability and purpose as to the utility of the need. James Thurber’s “Walter Mitty” (the full title of the short story, which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1939, is “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) relished the inherent escapism provided by the contrasting chasm between the monotony and oppressive reality of daily living in comparison to the far reaches of one’s imagination, thereby revealing the unconstrained heights of the human mind. […]

 
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Federal Disability Retirement: The Hug That Wasn’t

Regrets are priceless; they lack both a marketplace value, as well as a worth beyond applicability of accounting principles. The conceptual void of negation; the paradox of non-existence and nothingness; the chasm of obsolescence and absence where once perceptual conformity allowed for the revelation of a thing; these are all within the imaginative mind of the human puzzle. What possible evolutionary utility can be ascribed to things that did not happen, could have, but never did, and where the pit of void in one’s stomach leaves a dissatisfying wanting of that which could have been? […]

 
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Federal & Postal Medical Retirement through the OPM: The House of Doom, with a Spare Room

The inescapable tangles and chains of oblivion are often those dark recesses within one’s psyche; Houdini merely performed to the public the capacity and ability to escape physical constraints; the greater challenge for most continues in the deterioration of the psychology of despondency. Whatever the paradigm of modern medicine bases its treatment approach, whether on an organic component, subconscious repression of childhood trauma, […]

 
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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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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 …

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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FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement for Federal and USPS Workers: ICM versus ICBM

During the Cold War era, the latter acronym was familiar to most, as fears were magnified as to the intercontinental capacity of the U.S.S.R. (those who can still decipher this immediately reveals one’s age). In those days, one did not need to know the Eastern […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement for Federal and USPS Workers: Differences

The weather comes upon us; as a cloudy day dominates, so a sense of darkness and foreboding can impact one’s emotional life; some days are better than others. In the virtual world of our antiseptic lives, surrounded by such advancement of technology […] Read More …