In honor of Mother's Day, Sandra Fluke wants us to ask our mothers and grandmothers what challenges they had gaining access to birth control. I suspect this is a question that will puzzle quite a few mothers ("your father had to walk half a mile to the store to buy condoms") and offend quite a few grandmothers ("excuse me, dear?").

What's with this presumption that A) everyone's mom and grandma used birth control in the first place, B) they had trouble accessing it, and C) they'll actually welcome this question, regardless of whether they used it or not? I don't like this mindset that everyone should feel entitled to ask questions about their relatives' sex lives. I don't like the mindset that people should feel entitled to ask questions about anyone's sex life.

Both of my grandmothers are/were (one is deceased) devotedly Catholic, and judging by the fact that one had six kids and one had five, I'm pretty sure neither one ever used contraception. My maternal grandmother's forms of "birth control" were called My Husband's Fighting the Axis Powers in the Pacific and My Husband's in an Army Hospital Recovering from Nearly Losing His Legs.

My parents spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to get pregnant with me. Unlike finding birth control in America from the 1970s onward, some things actually involve struggling and high expenses.

So, remember when I was writing about donating baby hats to crisis pregnancy centers in every state? Since I started in either July or August (I forget which), I've donated at least 20 hand-knit baby hats to all of the states in blue:

THIS IS LIKE THE MOST EXCITING THING EVER.

It's in a pretty quiet neighborhood; it's a reasonable distance from Mr. Marauder's work, my parents' house, and his mom's house; it's a recently flipped four-level split; it's got four bedrooms, granite countertops, cherry cupboards, two full bathrooms, good-sized trees and bushes, a two-car garage, fluffy carpet, a pretty new roof, a pretty big fenced-in yard, loads of closet space, and definitely enough room for all my stuff. :D (Mr. Marauder has maybe one-third of the amount of stuff I do.) We just barely beat out the second-highest offer and this is definitely my favorite house of all the ones we've looked at. (Mr. Marauder liked a different house a tiny bit more than this one, but somebody outbid us there, and he does really like this one.) This is so exciting, I can't even begin to tell you.

The only disadvantages of the house, which are minor, are that 1) the garage is just barely big enough for two cars, 2) we need to buy a washer and a dryer, and 3) the driveway and the sidewalk that goes from the driveway to the front door are sort of cracked up, although not ridiculously so, and will probably need to be redone in another few years. Also, every single room is painted the same light sand color, so we'll probably want to repaint at least a couple of rooms just for variety. Still, compared to the flaws with some of the houses we've seen, none of these are remotely a big deal. Most noteworthy flaws we saw in other houses, in no order:

1. Hideous dog pee smell in the basement.
2. Wrinkly carpet, in at least four different rooms, that wasn't properly stretched before it was installed.
3. Carpet with a big glob of dried glue on a seam.
4. Hole in the wall where somebody got mad and punched. (Foreclosed-upon house.)
5. Crawlspace that smelled like a dead body.
6. Neighboring yard that looked like something from Hoarders.
7. Bedroom window that overlooked one thing: the brown wall of the neighbors' house.
8. Extreme proximity to busy freeway.
9. Entire house that was last decorated during the Nixon administration, complete with ancient, non-working intercom system.
10. Warped water-damaged ceiling in the bathroom.
11. Five or six different types of clashing wallpaper in one house.
12. Bedroom window levels that screamed, "Hey, local psychos! Climb in this window and kidnap our children!"
13. Trim in basement that was halfway missing, halfway mismatched.
14. Tiny split-entry that was just big enough to step inside the door before having to climb or descend stairs.
15. Huge wide steps to the front door that would have to be shoveled every single time it snowed at least an inch.
16. Backyard that sloped at a roughly eighty-five-degree angle.
17. Motorcycle and woman in bikini painted on wall in unfinished basement.
18. Once-beige basement carpeting that rusty leaking pipes had turned burnt orange.
19. Claustrophobic loft master bedroom with barely enough room for a bed.
20. Backyard with concrete patio and small dirt patch unable to grow grass.
21. Hyper-landscaped front and back yards filled with stylized bushes and white rocks.
22. Basement that stank like mildew.
23. Family room that looked like a cheap 1980s version of an old west saloon.
24. Worn and partially faded brown carpet that screamed 1970-something.
25. Bright gold walls in kitchen, dining room, and living room.

It's been an adventure...

Mr. Marauder and I found a house we really love and we've made an offer for, and we have until Monday to beat out the other offerors, and my parents just decided they're giving us money to help us towards that goal. This is the forty-something-th house we've looked at. Hope and prayers very much appreciated!

(Not April Fool's...)

Dharun Ravi got convicted of spying on Tyler Clementi, committing a hate crime, witness tampering, and evidence tampering. He's facing up to ten years and deportation. If one article I read is correct, the judge has to sentence him to at least three years. THANK YOU GOD.

This guy is scum. I hope that he changes and turns into a decent human being, but as of right now, he's scum. He thought he could get a free pass because oh, he's just a dumb kid, he had no idea how to respond to the fact that his roommate was making out with a guy, what can we expect from an eighteen-year-old. We can expect him to treat his roommate like a human being with feelings and rights, that's what we can expect. Ravi wasn't ten. He was eighteen and smart enough that he got into Rutgers. If Tyler Clementi hadn't committed suicide, Ravi's actions would still be despicable. He's a high-tech version of the guy who spies through people's windows and uses what he sees to humiliate them. He should be ashamed of himself.

From everything I've read, Tyler Clementi sounds like a sweet, awkward guy who was trying to figure out how to live a life that would make him happy. I can relate to that a lot. Tyler could have been a rotten punk and Ravi's actions would still be wrong. Youth is not an excuse for not being a decent human being.

Ravi deserves every single second of prison time that he gets. I would have a modicum of respect for him if, after Tyler's suicide, he had realized he was in it deep and not started running around trying to delete and conspire to save himself from the consequences of his actions. He thought he could get away with that too. He couldn't. I hope this makes people realize that you can't break laws to treat people like crap and expect to just walk on by without consequences.

Sometimes I think I'm supposed to exist (as in, why was I put on this earth?) so I can make other people happy, not so I can be happy myself.

Rush Limbaugh has been rightly chastised enough over this Sandra Fluke thing without me spending my time joining the chorus. I want to spend my time talking about Despicably-Behaving Dude #2 in this whole controversy: Sandra Fluke's boyfriend.

If your girlfriend is testifying in public that she has a hard time paying for contraception, well, you're failing as a boyfriend. If you hadn't been failing as a boyfriend, she would have told you this before she told the rest of the world, and you would have said, "Honey, don't worry about that - I'll chip in and pay for half of it. Heck, I'll pay for the whole thing if possible. I love you and I don't want you to stress out over this, okay? Let's go out for pizza and then I'll help you study for your Torts exam. Come here and give me a kiss."

This is who Sandra Fluke should be calling out, not Georgetown - a Catholic school that she chose to attend. This is the other adult who has a stake in whether or not she gets pregnant. To paraphrase the girls on Maury, "You gots to step up and be a man and make sure you ain't having no babies." And if Sandra Fluke doesn't have a boyfriend and is having sex casually enough that there's no one to fill the role here, well, do we really want to be the ones funding that behavior? Casual sex with multiple people is not good for one's health. It's like cigarettes - yeah, you can do it legally, but it's not a good idea and you're not entitled to have strangers pay so you can keep doing it.

Has anyone else raised the issue of where the heck "Mr. Sandra Fluke" is and why he thinks he should get to have sex with her without assuming any of the responsibility? This guy isn't worthy of your time or the intimacies of your body, Sandra. This guy should be doing whatever he has to do so he has enough money to help you with this. Obviously you're intelligent enough that you got into law school - you're too intelligent to settle for this doofus.

I went to bed about halfway through the Oscars - the bar exam is tomorrow - and here are my thoughts.

1. Too many online articles/blogs saying young people have no idea who Billy Crystal is. Well, I'm twenty-five and I know exactly who Billy Crystal is, thank you very much. Tell the teenyboppers he's the guy who played Miracle Max in The Princess Bride. That movie has enough of a cult following that at least half of them should make the connection.

Billy Crystal is, bar none, the best living person to host the Oscars. Very glad to see him back.

2. If I were a member of the Academy, I would have voted for Viola Davis for Best Actress and Jessica Chastain for Best Supporting Actress, but I still think Octavia Spencer deserved to win. (Both she and Jessica Chastain were good, but I think that in a way Jessica Chastain had the more difficult part.) Was the standing ovation for Octavia Spencer because everyone loves Octavia Spencer, or because Hollywood was congratulating itself for giving a black woman an Oscar? I have an uneasy feeling it was the latter. Quit giving yourself cookies for how non-racist you are, Hollywood - just treat people equally and go about your business.

Octavia Spencer had a great dress, by the way.

3. The last time I saw arms like Angelina Jolie's was on Demi Moore, who is apparently still hospitalized. Forget the much-displayed leg; those are not healthy arms.

4. If you ever placed a bet about the exact color of Jennifer Lopez's areola, time to settle up. My God, that dress was heinous. HEINOUS.

5. Too many guys with questionable facial hair.

6. Meryl Streep is undoubtedly a good actress, but I don't know if anyone is a good enough actor or actress to merit the roughly eight billion nominations she's gotten, especially when every year there are great performances that never get their due. (I was totally shocked to find out that this year was Gary Oldman's first nomination; last year I was shocked to find out it was Christian Bale's first nomination.) May do a post later on my favorite performances that the Oscars ignored. If I don't get around to doing a whole post - Walter Olkewicz in "The Client."

7. The noisy slurping sound you here is everyone sucking up to George Clooney. I have never understood the idol-worship towards this guy.

8. If you got five movie-industry people in a room and asked them how to pronounce "Scorsese," you'd get three different answers.

9. Every time I think of Christopher Plummer, I think of this story that one of the now-grown-up kids from "The Sound of Music" told once - allegedly he screamed at the kids, "Get out of my dressing room, you little bastards!"

10. Penelope Cruz had a great dress but subpar hair.

I've been pretty critical of J. K. Rowling since HBP and even more critical of her since DH, but I'd like to give credit where credit is due and congratulate her on writing a book that has nothing to do with Harry Potter - or, even, children's literature. I think this is what she needs to advance her skills as a writer. Hopefully her editors will get their butts in gear and help her shape it to be the best book it can be; she's at her best when every single sentence is important to the plot in some way, shape or form and not just a random detour. (Contrast PoA, in which everything from Ron's rat's missing toe to Hermione's class schedule is important, to HBP, where she wasted pages on Harry's apparation lessons only to have him never pass his test.)

Creatively, once people start resting on their laurels, their work starts to suck, no matter how talented they are. I'm hoping this is going to be a big climb upward to the next laurel for JKR.

Health insurance exists to help people when they get sick. It does not exist so people can make, for free, the personal choice to take pills to affect their perfectly healthy reproductive systems. Some people might make the personal choice to have rhinoplasties on their perfectly healthy noses or add implants to their perfectly healthy breasts, but no one's expected to pay for that. Sex may be a great thing in the right circumstances, but there's no essential legal right to have other people pay for the issues that result from your sex life.

I learned in bar review class that there's an essential right to interstate travel. That means I'm free to get on a bus and go to Wisconsin or get on a plane and go to South Carolina. Should the government pay for me to exercise this essential right? No, because I'm the one who made the decision to go to Wisconsin or South Carolina.

We didn't make the Quakers go fight against Hitler, and he was Hitler, arguably the most evil man of the twentieth century. If the US government had said, "Damn it, Friends, you're going to get out there and help fight this war before all the Jews are dead and London is renamed Hitlerton!", that would be wrong, but it would have been a wrong decision in which reasonable people could have seen both sides of the argument. "Damn it, Catholic hospitals and universities, you're going to get out there and provide contraception before another living person is brought into the world!" doesn't exactly have the same moral heft.

I don't know where Obama got the "fact" that 99% of women have taken birth control, an obviously false statement if there ever was one. When you add together lesbians who have never had sex with men, women who had to have hysterectomies, women who were done having kids by the time birth control was widely available, women who have never had sex with anyone, and women who don't take birth control for religious, personal, or health-related reasons, you've got to have over 1% of the adult American female population. This is especially obvious when you take into account that 18-year-old girls count as adult women.

100% of Americans were threatened by WWII - well, I suppose there may have been some Nazi sympathizers who welcomed the idea of Hitler triumphant. We still didn't make the Quakers pick up guns and go to war. It was against their religious beliefs.

I went to Catholic school for sixteen years, and one thing everyone knows in Catholic school is that when you decided to be part of a Catholic institution, you agreed to let your education/job be at least partially governed by Catholic principles. No one - except, if you're a kid, maybe your parents - made you go to Our Lady of Guadeloupe High School or work at St. Anne's Hospital. Don't expect Jews to put pork on the lunch menu, don't expect Mormons to incorporate miniskirts into the uniform, and don't expect Catholics to pay for your contraception.

Obama's whole, "the institutions won't pay, the insurance will pay" makes no sense to me. Insurance is a business. People pay for them to operate. If the money is from the federal government, it originated with taxpayers. From a public relations standpoint, this may be the dumbest decision this administration has made. From a constitutional standpoint, it's abhorrent.