FERS Disability: being on owcp and sick leave for a long time

Disability Retirement from Federal Jobs: The Time we Spend

August 17, 2019

The time we spend implies the level of our concern, our interests and our priorities. The proportionality reveals where one’s “mind’ resides. If work takes up the greater portion of our lives, then one is deemed a workaholic; if video entertainment seems to dominate, then some will whisper of being “addicted”; or of too much of anything — leisure, pleasures, topical asides or exotic obsessions — the tendency is to make judgments based upon the time given and the attention reserved. […]

OPM Disability Retirement Help: The Man from Mars

December 10, 2018

It is a strangeness that cannot be avoided. Sort of like Thomas Nagel’s famous philosophical essay, “What is it like to be a bat — for a bat?” It is the “for a bat” that makes all of the difference; for, as Nagel himself pointed out, it is easy to imagine what it is like to be a bat — i.e., have wings, fly in the dark of night, screech, eat bugs, etc. However, the uniqueness of actually being another creature […]

OPM Medical Retirement Benefits: Confused confusion

November 14, 2018

Why confuse the confused? Why confuse further the confusion that already confused even the least of the confused? Why add to the confusion when the confused are confused enough as it is, and when confusion should be relieved by less confusion instead of confusing everyone further by adding to the confusion? […]

Attorney Representation OPM Disability Retirement: Thinking it through

August 9, 2017

What does the concept even mean? When we guide the child with such a statement, we are asking that the formative years of impulsive reactivity pause for a moment to try a different approach. “Think it through” – is an admonition to figure out the tangled web of problems by applying a sequential, logical methodology where frustration should not impede, and when patience becomes the friend of success. “Thinking it through” is a reminder that there is indeed a solution, […]

Federal Disability Retirement: The traveling troubadour and trobairitz

July 5, 2016

There are vocations and careers which once were, and now forgotten. Life cycles in endless streams of dying embers and regeneration of growth; and like the mythical Phoenix which arises from the ashes of destruction, so we tend to romanticize that which once was, is now forever lost in the forgotten residues of concealed fingerprints in timeless memories once secluded but dissipated as storytellers no longer found an audience for tales left untold, and children turned to self-amusement with videos, technological blank stares, and smartphones which glow well into the night. […]

Federal Employee Medical Retirement Benefits: The Diary

June 28, 2016

Many begin the process at an early age, then abandon it with little remorse or afterthought, as a worthless project discarded for want of inherent value; and when, years and even decades later, it is discovered behind a bureau or a secret cubbyhole where trinkets and memorabilia retaining an eternal aura of privately precious remembrances are stored away, we shriek with joy as if the lottery had been won, a proposal has been declared, or a camouflaged vault containing the mysteries of gemstones […]

Federal Disability Retirement: The lethargic state of tacit acceptance

June 16, 2016

Life has a way of beating down. Whether it is from the constant drudgery of daily responsibilities, or perhaps the overwhelming bombardment of the harsh technological stimuli foreign yet to the still evolutionary sensibilities of nature’s slow progression for adaptability; the human body, mind and soul, while possessing a capacity […]

OPM Medical Retirement: When we used to speak of meaningful things

May 31, 2016

Perhaps the negation of ideas trickles down, just as water from a crack in the roof tiles; of Derrida, Foucault and the deconstruction movement after the lengthy period of disillusionment represented by the French Existentialists headed by Camus and Sartre; for, if meaning constitutes parity and the loss of hierarchies and paradigms in crumbling corners of inconvenient truths, then Orwell’s prediction of how totalitarianism will infect society with the tools of our own making, will come about sooner than we thought possible. […]