Federal Disability Retirement: And then we are gone…

The trailing ellipsis establishes a pause for reflection, and the finality of three periods for an emphasis upon the irreversible nature of the statement.  “And then” connotes that something preceded – a lifetime of activities, a century or less of human historicity involving birth, growth, work, struggles, etc. – existed before the conclusion of the life.  The “we are” slice of the sentence implies two additional variables: the universality of involvement – an event that excludes no one […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement Benefits: Threads

They are fragile and subject to being snapped; yet, we rely upon them to hold together the fabric of so many things, both in practical terms and in more nuanced settings of conceptual constructs cloaked in figurative speech.  As in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, that invisible thread that gently tugs despite isolation, renunciation and attribution of apostasy in the chaos of cultural confusion; or of the woven cloth where thousands in aggregate intersecting patterns creates the strength of multitudes where the single entity would snap upon the breath of a dragon’s snore. […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Designing a different biography

Each of us has one, but we know not what it states; for, it is what is written and carried by someone else, and not from ourselves. Yes, yes, we also have an “autobiography”, as well – a narrative of how we see ourselves, in what manner, of what form, in what scintillating and scandalous light. But it is the collective viewpoints of all whom we have encountered that comprise, constitute and in the compendium of the aggregate, tell the story of “that person” – you. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Civil Service: The Clock

It is an interesting device. We can try and project back to a time of its non-existence, or at least when not every household owned one. What could it have been like? Where the hour was guessed at by the position of the sun – or was that not even part of the thought process? Did the sun, dawn, dusk and twilight merely present a foreboding for a different paradigm? Certainly, minutes and seconds likely had conceptual meaninglessness, and everyone worked, played and lived for the “moment”, […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement under FERS: Perfect lives

Where are they?  Beyond Platonic Forms and heavenly orbs where the golden dust sparingly sprinkled from the wings of angels in flight, do perfect lives exist and, if so, where?  We can suspend disbelief and fantasize of celebrities and the lives of Wall Street wolves with their mansions, beautiful bodies and facial grimaces so tightened by plastic surgery as to make smiling an exertion of monumental phenomena; but, in the end, we all realize that the pinnacle of human achievement is but another endeavor of human fallacy, and never approaching the omniscience of an Aristotelian Unmoved Mover. […] Read More …