Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
How one leaves is often important — not just subjectively, but encompassing consequences and reverberations unanticipated. Consider the ultimate departure — of leaving a Will or not. One might counter that, well, What difference does it make?; I won’t be there to witness what happens after I am gone; and, in any event, who cares if they fight over what little possessions I leave. […]
Living in modernity is a complex juggling act that never ends. Simplicity recollected in former times often harken towards an idealization that perhaps never existed, where toil, labor and survival were a coalescence of a person’s life, and meaning was never divorced from what one was engaged in, the acts of striving, the struggle to earn a living. Modernity magnifies Marx’s observation that human discontent is a result of separating man’s labor from the self-esteem of accomplishment, where the factory worker sees merely a microcosm of monotony […]
It is rare for the individual to accept constructive criticism; rarer still, to invite and welcome it in any form, whether destructive, constructive or otherwise characterized as “positive”, “negative” or “neutral”. The fact is that few of us accept any form of it at all, and quickly respond with the rebuttal: “It’s not constructive”. But why does it need to be? […]
The pendulum between a swollen ego and a timid conscience can be wide and vast; or of the difference between panicked shyness amounting to a hermit’s refuge, and arrogance in man that betrays the smallness of one’s heart. Being “puffed up” is one thing; demanding one’s rights without persuasive argumentation, quite another. In formulating one’s “story” in preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, specifically on SF 3112A, Applicant’s Statement of Disability, the undersigned lawyer has seen […]
You go out for a moment – perhaps to smoke a cigarette (do people actually do that these days?), to “freshen up” (is that necessarily a sexist presumption, in that women are the only ones who need to do so, or wasn’t it more likely just a euphemism to avoid the crass declaration that one has to “go to the potty”?) or just to get away from the din of dinner conversation; and, upon reentering the room those eyes look askance, askew, and away from you. What happened? […]