FERS Disability: Post Office disability retirement

OPM Disability Retirement Benefits: The picture album

November 15, 2017

Time was, every family had a picture album – that anachronism bound carefully in a large leather book-shaped monstrosity, kept safe where dust settles and mice scurry around; taken out for occasions where boredom is accentuated and friends or neighbors have stayed long past their welcome, and so it is taken out carefully, dusted off and laboriously paged through, telling of a history for each page, each photograph laid meticulously upon the thick plaster-backboard of a person’s history. […]

Federal Disability Retirement: Fate and fatalism

November 1, 2017

When people talk about “fate”, they must mean something more than what they actually state in an explanation. People often misspeak, of course, or explain with justification without much thought put into the narrative given. So, when a person says, for example, that “X happened,” and when asked why, the response is often, “Oh, it was just fate. It was meant to be.” What can that possibly mean? To say that X occurred because it was “fated”, or was “meant to be”, is no different than to say that an apple is a fruit because it’s not an orange; […]

OPM Disability Retirement Law: The unsolvable dilemma

August 4, 2017

Most of us live linear lives. It is a characteristic of Western Civilization that the thought-processes involve a sequential, step-by-step, logical extension and advancement. Much has been said about this approach, in contrast to an “Eastern” philosophical methodology, where there is a “circular” mind-set that often involves the complexities of reincarnation, capacity to assimilate inconsistent, incommensurate and seemingly incompatible belief-systems – and, indeed, to even describe the “other” as a “methodology” is an oxymoron of unfair proportions, […]

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: The clinical language

April 19, 2017

The antiseptic nature of language allows for the euphemism of linguistic cloaking to occur. The corollary effect, however, is that it fails to provide a nexus to the humanity lost, and allows for an arrogance of language by imparting its distance and separation from warmth. Clinical language has that characteristic, steeped in the mysterious and archaic history of Gregorian chants at altars once embodying the Eucharist’s theological secrets of transubstantiation with the priesthood undulating in phrases foreign to ears of modernity; […]

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The wish for erasure

April 14, 2017

Once, we used pencils because such implements are almost always accompanied by an eraser. It was an acknowledgment of human imperfection, of the potentiality for making a mistake, and the realization that any extent of human activity should recognize the wish, the need and reality for erasure. But that such corrections could similarly be made for lives lived, hurts fostered and damages perpetrated. Yet, the historical requirement that has necessitated the wish for erasure has itself been erased, or significantly diminished – of a conscience instilled and allowed for maturation, […]

Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: Edifying false gods

April 12, 2017

Are falsity and nonexistence equivalent concepts? If you believe in something that cannot be proven, but nevertheless turns out to not exist but yet cannot be verified with certitude or confirmed validity, is it a “false” belief? Conversely, if there is general recognition, acknowledgment and consensus of agreement that embracing a certain paradigm is an act of futility precisely because it is deemed to be “false”, but doing so provides a semblance and feeling of comfort and security, does such submission to falsity encompass any substantive differentiation from a mistaken but unsubstantiated belief? […]

FERS Disability Retirement from OPM: Moving on

March 29, 2017

That is what people want to do, and in the aggregate, the world around. In engagements with others, there is a limited and quantifiable extent of patience. It is tantamount to that ‘arc of flight’ that every animal possesses – as long as you remain outside of that safe-zone, you will be a suspicious entity perceived by watchful caution; […]

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: False Promises

March 15, 2017

Is it an oxymoron? If it is made, how can it be negated by untruth; for, if it is a nothingness at the outset which compels null and void the substantive content of the thing itself, how can it purport to be what it is while at the same time creating an abyss of meaninglessness? A promise cannot be false if it is to have the very meaning of a promise; and yet, we know that there exists such falsity of posited assurances, if not proposed by dishonest individuals and con-men, then at least by unintentional or otherwise mistaken pillars of vain malfeasance. […]

Medical Retirement from Federal Government Employment: Life’s Joke

July 2, 2016

The funniest line in literature comes from Carl Sandburg’s “Potato Face Blind Man” stories, where he describes the reason for the wooden mug: “There is a hole in the bottom of it. The hole is as big as the bottom. The nickel goes in and comes out again. It is for the very poor people who wish to give me a nickel and yet get the nickel back.” Satire has often been overly-discussed, and attempting to explain why a particular scene, line or story is amusing, is somewhat like trying to explain to a Martian why Bradbury’s chronicles fascinated […]

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The Little Engine that Couldn’t

January 6, 2016

It is an educational tool utilized to impart upon children the value of hard work and unfettered optimism, but one wonders, At what point should the harsh realities of the world be included? How, sometimes there are situations where the obstacles are so great and the conspiratorial caverns so deep that the graph of upward mobility is but a mere mirage in life’s cycle of certitude. […]