Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
As a practical device, it retains nutrients and cooks various foods faster because of the intensity of the heat, thereby quickly forcing nutrients out into the cauldron of mixed vegetables, all the while tenderizing the tough meat. As a metaphor, it represents a symbol of the human condition: Stolid on the outside, reaching uncontrollable and explosive currents beneath the surface. […]
The initial reaction to such a title is the obvious one: To what? Of course, Newton’s Third Law of Motion comes immediately to mind — of every action having an equal and opposite reaction; thus, when one posits a “resistance”, the natural query must refer to its opposition, as in, “What is it that we are resisting?” Throughout our “stages of life”, we either comply, conform, “go along with the crowd” — or resist doing so. […]
Wouldn’t a “hell” by definition encompass privacy and insularity? For, isn’t one of the benefits of commiserating and “sharing” (in the modern parlance) that one expiates the pains and troubles one experiences? Thus, if a hell is to be a hell, wouldn’t it be in seclusion and in solitary confinement for all eternity; otherwise, the hell described would be less than hell because it would be a lessened state of agony and torture […]
They are the projects of life of which Heidegger recognizes, allowing for avoiding the inevitabilities of life’s challenges; of fate, mortality, future insecurity, and death. What quantifiable slice of one’s life is governed by distractions? Must it always be less than 50% in order to remain so, and if it exceeds that halfway point, does it then become something substantive and not merely the peripheral meaning of what it means to “be distracted”? If a distraction is considered to be an aside – that which waylays a person’s attention by focusing upon […]
There are often foreboding signs which we conveniently ignore. In retrospect, how often do we hear of the lament of disregard? “I never thought…”; “I heard the sound, but –“; “There were some indications, but I just assumed…” Yet, later, we recognize those telltale footprints, and wonder why the creaking floorboards or the muffled murmur […]
The loss in Western Civilization of the pursuance of Truth (note the capitalization of the term, in contradistinction from the mundane daily tropes of common factual observations, such as the classic example of pointing to an object and making a declarative utterance, for purely identification’s sake) has resulted in a vacuum of sorts; the consequences reverberate by group identification and causes aggregated based upon preference and subjective elevation of all things decadent. […]
The two concepts are often confused; for the Federal employee and the U.S. Postal Service worker filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, the frustration is often voiced precisely because of the misapplication of the legal import between them. Eligibility is determined by the contingencies which must be met, the thresholds of prerequisites which must be satisfied: […]
Often, the noise emanating and pervading is nothing more than the raucous shrieks and glass-shattering sounds like the cackle of birds; neither intelligible nor pleasant to the ear, it fails to inform, engender pleasure, nor spur substantive advancement for the intellect or one’s emotional well-being. People talk; talk is limitless; and the louder one talks (or so the theory goes) and endures past all others, the last voice establishes the truth of the matter. The problem in modernity is not so much the boisterousness and overpowering continuum of noise; rather, it is the inability to recognize the lesser argument, the weaker factual basis, […]
There are those we sometimes meet in life where the infectiousness of enthusiasm cannot be avoided. Whether such active energy can be truly sustained, to what extent, and for how long; and, whether such enthusiasm is matched within the essence of the being behind the veil of smiles and outward appearances, only the heart and soul knows in the privacy of one’s chambers. Whether an artifice for show and appearances, or a true bundle of vitality, the reality of such people and their existence is besides the point; rather, the real issue to consider is the contrasting starkness which is revealed when encountering such people. […]
The tragedy of extinguishment is the failure to recognize future potentiality. We often gauge the value of a lifetime based upon the quality of any given day. Yet, what happens in an arbitrary period of a life, whether viewed randomly on a day, or even assessed and evaluated over a decade, will rarely reflect the comparative worth of a lifetime as analyzed on a linear continuum. Youth is a wasted period of emergence; […]