FERS & CSRS Medical Disability Retirement: Judgment

How does it develop? Does youth necessarily, by definition, undermine the existence of it, and if so, why does such a “rule” become obviated by the old fool who rests his arms (and other elements of the anatomy) upon the shoulders of one who could be one’s grandchild, only not by birth? Is life not linear, but circular, and thus do we all revert back to childish ways when old age and decrepit bodies reveal the sanctity of our fragile mortality? When Darwinism prevailed upon the civilization of discontent, did we not recognize that ultimate reductionism to pure materialism would trickle down into a singular desire to discover the fountain of youth? […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: Dickens, Salinger & Capote, Continued…

One could easily spend a lifetime on each, separately; of the first in the trilogy, he mercifully died before the advent of the industrial revolution, whence he may have witnessed even greater upheavals of economic unrest and labor turmoil; of the latter two, they were contemporaries who followed divergent paths — with Salinger left in the hermitage of his insular world of fears, paranoia and distrust of a world which had offered only experiences which validated such churning for a tortured soul, and for Capote, a premature death prompted by a life of public destruction. […] Read More …

The Self-Image of a Postal or Federal Employee after a Disabling Injury or Other Medical Condition

Thurber’s Walter Mitty is not an anomaly; each of us carries a fiction within our insular souls, of lives extended into a world of fantasy, trespassing between daydreams and thoughts of heroic deeds beyond the mundane routines of daily living.  Perhaps there are those in the world whose lives are so adventure-filled that such retinues of alternative parallelism […] Read More …

The Federal Employee’s Confused Sense of Identity

It is through ascription from third parties, over extended time periods, where the development of self-identity takes root, through subtle, incremental ways, until one day, unnoticed, without fanfare and unheralded, it becomes a known quantity of acceptance within one’s social circles, professional associations and the greater macrocosmic world we encounter.  The day or the time can never be pinpointed;  […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Ends and Beginnings

One can be pensive or mournful about it; anxiety levels likely attach to either event; one is described and defined as the conclusion and afterthought, the other, as a preface or introduction.  The end of an event necessarily results in change, as does the beginning; and perhaps it is merely a circularity of unending infinity, or a linear continuum which extends beyond the horizon of concavity. […] Read More …