Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
The various components of our lives reveal the type of species we are, and the reflected anthropomorphism that parallels cannot be avoided. Is the clutter in our life an expression of functionality or of an ostentatious display to stand out and apart? The car we choose to drive; the clothes we wear; the expressions we adopt, […]
It can refer to the particular or the general, interchangeably almost without thought. To refer to these “perilous times” is to ascribe to a particular period, an epoch or an era, an acknowledgment that the surrounding days and months are unique from all other timeframes of perceived dangers and tumultuous upheavals. Or, it can be quite personal — where one describes specific circumstances concerning one’s own life, […]
It is always “new beginnings”, “new births”, “turning over a new leaf” and so many other faddish starts, stops, putters and “reset buttons”. The “New Year” brings about a calendric initiation based upon geometrical calculations as to what constitutes the inception of a repetition we fail to understand. Does nature care whether or not we impose upon it the cycle of restarting from the first day of the year, or does the natural world simply move on, […]
In human history, class structure — whether of bloodlines or lineage; of wealth or claim to title and royalty; or of validated descendants from ancestral superiority — has been the norm. Then, along came a religious figure (unnamed herein to avoid risk of inflammatory offense and preventing the potential for implosions of alarming hashtags in fits of fear and panic) who posited the notion that the “poor” (that class of mass populace which comprises the greater part of the world) should take “pity” upon the “rich” (those in the minority of the greater class struggle who control and manipulate the invisible levers of the world) […]
“Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way around; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.” #203, Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Life is never a static construct; those who consider it so, are sorely left behind when the winds of change suddenly fill the sails and the slumbering ship awakens with a groan to pull free of its moorings. Left behind are the days when a person could count on the vocation of the parent, or of a career singular throughout. […]
There is that moment of haziness, where sleep has not yet overtaken and consciousness has not yet been fully lost, where the philosophical abyss of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or stands in relation to knowledge, truth, insight and puzzlement, and where questions abound concerning the relationship between words and the objective reality of constellations clashing amidst bursting stars and black holes. Sleep is a realm sought after; restorative sleep, a state of being which, without explanation or cause, we accept as a necessity of life’s conundrums. […]
It is both an identifier of a specific part of the human body, as well as a noun used to describe a sophisticated and discriminating characteristic of the human animal. Used in the former manner, it merely describes nothing more than the biological component in common with all other animals; as presented in the latter form, it distinguishes from the greater commonplace testament of a refinement not otherwise found. […]
Pyrite is often the element mistaken for gold, with its bright yellow appearance and shiny, reflective compound. Why a given mineral is determined of greater value than another of similar appearance is a complicated affair, encapsulating economic principles of supply and demand, the fungibility and replacement feature of one over the other, and the plain fact that the elemental differentiation itself constitutes “real” versus “fake”. It is, in history books, novels and plays, a metaphor for greed, corruption, ill-fated endeavors, and motives which propel obsessions of determined failure and futility. […]
Life brings about natural “stages” — paralleling certain age requirements, with subsets and parenthetical footnotes as to each. As the queried riddle posed by the Sphinx (“What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, three legs in the evening, and no legs at night?”) brings about clarity of identity, so the stages of life provide a glimpse into the inherent complexity of man’s psyche. […]