Medical Retirement from Federal Government Employment: Ruins

We take extraordinary steps just to visit them; of the Parthenon, the Athenian Acropolis; of the Great Wall of China; of unspeaking relics where life once bustled, and still does but in a different way; of mere onlookers to a civilization once vibrant, but now twice removed — first, in the incremental abandonment of a society no longer relevant, and second, by the implicit concession that tourism establishes the death of the substantive content of any collection of structures. Or of Aleppo, where modern-day devastation intersects with the ruins of old, and where actual suffering echoes throughout the ancient cascades where antiquity overwhelms the current screams of flesh and blood. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Medical Retirement: Myths of our own making

What stories we carry within our own heads; the narrative of our own lives, as well as the intersecting conveyances brought by others; the web of linguistic larcenies borrowed, bought and sometimes sold, become who we are and the essence of our being within the world of our phenomenology of existence. Sometimes, when a lie is told and the piece of puzzle will no longer fit into the greater collage of the manifold tapestry we carry about within our psyche, a rearrangement of sorts must occur. Perhaps, we discovered, through correspondence and other confirming […] Read More …

Federal OPM Disability Retirement: Parsing words and convoluted sentences

Choosing the appropriate word in linguistic expression is the corridor for comprehension; like weapons in the wrong hands and the capacity to push the proverbial button to initiate a first strike, the modern proponent of the elasticity of language has been accused of taking the parsing of it a bridge too far. Of course, the general consensus is that lawyers “are to blame”; for, in engaging the fine-print and analysis of syntactic components to their exponential extremes, the convoluted manner in which meanings are twisted, coiled and folded into multiple layers of annotations, denotations and connotations, implies a loss of symbiosis between words, reality and the correspondence between the two. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement Annuity: The mindset resulting in a witch’s brew

We can often dismiss antiquity with ease by relegating personalities to caricatures and stereotypes. Thus, of the Crusaders, that they were merely simple folk unsophisticated in the evolutionary Darwinism of modernity; of Roman legions, fearful of punishment and brought up to bear the cruelty of his environment; or even of more recent vintage, the gunslinger out West — of Billy the Kid or Wild Bill Hickok, where legend surpasses the individual and becomes fact. But a slight alteration of a vantage point can skew the perspective; and thus, when we focus upon the cauldron […] Read More …

FERS Medical Retirement: Meaning, Value and Worth

The last in the tripartite of this conceptual construct possesses a relational significance, where fluctuation of the assigned designation may occur based not upon extrinsic objectivity, but upon a personal sense of attachment, and thus the influence on a spectrum may artificially go up or down depending upon whims of fancy.  The middle term, on the other hand, […] Read More …