Memorial Day Sale: Safer alternative to cotton swabs - Cleaner Ears at home

Improve Your Hearing and Ear Health From Home with the Earscout Endoscope. Hear us out. There's now a safer, more accurate way to clean your ears from home. The Earscout Endoscope is equipped with an LED light and HD camera so you can carefully see what you're doing and improve your hear health, hearing and comfort. Simply download the app, plug in the device, and you're on your way to healthier hearing.   Shop Now     Smith-Caroll Tech Corp Partners 8489 Canyon Rim Circle #301 Englewood, CO 80112-4733 Update Communication Preferences                         Years back, on a summer night in Oregon's high desert, I was riding in a car with three other people. There were two women asleep in the backseat, leaning in opposite directions. I was in the front on the passenger's side, and a man was driving. Somebody had put Rod Stewart's Storyteller: The Complete Anthology, blaring and loud, on the car's sound system, and though I wouldn't have considered myself a fan, the heartfelt crooning was as seemingly endless and beautiful as the desert around us. We were wrapped in a velvet night, under a star-filled sky, headlights cutting through the dark. We were writers, carpooling back from a rare weekend retreat. A cool wind found its way in through a narrow slice of open window and whipped the driver's shaggy hair into a minor frenzy. Over the sound of Rod Stewart's mandolin, this driver scratched mosquito bites and told me about a woman writer he'd once known. ?She was so talented,? he said, in admiration. I envisioned a passive, classical sculpture of a beautiful woman being physically hoisted onto a pedestal. ?She was an awesome writer. Really, amazing.? Wistfully he added, ?She got married. I've never seen her writing again.? End of story. *** These are points on a line: the rise of potential, then the particularly feminized fall embedded in gentle, hetero domesticity. It's a wistful blend of longing, regret and admiration. For the story to work the way it always works, the woman has to be better than average. She has to shine. Then she conforms. Then she disappears, fading into the ambient noise of a dishwasher and the washing machine, the TV, lawnmower, barking dog, and family phones. She comes to mark a spot in memory, on a real writer's path. It's one of those story structures that's so pervasive, people harbor and project it onto the arc of a faint career well in advance. There might even be a sort of satisfaction taken in the comfort of assuming this path is inevitable for other people, those women writers who once foolishly set out to have it all. For the story to work the way it always works, the woman has to be better than average. She has to shine Then she conforms. Then she disappears? The narrative becomes, collectively, a place to put and justify failed dreams. It's a societal role, come to be expected. I've known women as undergrads who were never encouraged to apply for grad school because they were already married, or on the verge of possible marriage, or deeply coupled. Sometimes even a looming potential marriage was considered to eclipse other possibilities. Surely there was the implication of kids, eventually? Kids would mean a human sacrifice of time, to the cosmos, to the species.