Because the first day of Little League was rained out, my husband had a great idea. Shopping. We, as a family would go shopping. Well, since you can’t get a root canal on a rainy Saturday, a family outing to Bloomingdales is a fine runner up.

Mr. G. was (in theory) liking the layered look for springtime. He needed a few pair of pants and some work shirts, so off we went. My father had Jane so Mr. G, Alexander and I made a beeline for the Ralph Lauren section in the men’s department. Quickly we found a beautiful linen shirt and some khaki pants, classic Lauren. Then it was time for slim cut sweaters, jeans and shirts. As we three crossed the aisle to the premium denim section, Mr. G. stopped for a moment and looked at a mannequin that can only be described as feminine, and exclaimed, “I think we’re in the women’s section.” Our son Alexander shouted in agreement, “Only girls wear stuff like that.”

I smiled with my lips, and found a salesperson to help us. After two hours of clothing flying in every direction, Mr. G found a few suitable choices. When we got to the “white jeans” it was my turn to cause a scene.

“Excuse me.” I said to the sales clerk, “do you have a pair of these jeans that aren’t dirty?”

“They’re not dirty,” was her reply.

“Actually, they are filthy.” And I pointed to the streaks of gray running down my husband’s whitish pants.

Turns out that market research shows that men won’t buy white pants because they’re scared of getting them dirty. This year premium denim is made to look dirty. Every inch of me rejects this. Mr. G got the pants, he looks great in them, he looks great in everything.

Understand that I am the woman who hides detergent from her daughter, I am the woman that is so in love with clean clothing that I’ll be posting a love note to Kenmore later this week. I am that woman, and my husband… he bought dirty jeans.

I shrieked in the men’s department. I was loud.

At about the two hour mark Mr. G and Alexander were ready to go home, Jane had joined us and I’d run into a few friends. We went to the cashier and realized we were at bloomies for a huge sale. When she rang us up his total was $1740 before discounts (don’t froth at the mouth, this is not a typical shopping for us), and we’d get $250 discount. I noticed that if we spent $2,000 we’d get a $500 discount. On top of that, neither of us had a Bloomingdale’s card, so if we opened one there’d be another 20% off.

I made my family sit still and I ran up and down escalators finding my final items so I could hit the magical $2,000 mark without going over. I raced around like a TV contestant, and yes, if you look at the pictures below, you’ll see the shoes I got for myself. I do appreciate irony.

The good news? Fast forward 15 minutes and I added a few things for myself. Total cost? About $1350.

That is all.

The ever fabulous Marsha Collier sent me this.

Hashtag Spam and twitter parties (they are synonyms). If you are not familiar with Twitter, you might not be familiar with hashtags, surely you are familiar with Spam.

Twitter is a microblogging service. You can update your status using just 140 characters. It’s not quite a bulletin board, but it’s not a blog either. In order to maximize your very brief updates, you can add a hashtag to a word and twitter will make is searchable. A hashtag is the number sign #. When groups of people use a hashtag it makes it easier for them to find each other. Quite often at an event there will be a predetermined hashtag in use. The 140 Conference uses the hashtag #140conf take a look at how helpful an event hashtag can be. Shortly, we will all be able to see SXSW emerge as a trending topic, and, for lack of a better term, get the back channel of the conference and it’s parties (or is it the parties and the conference?).

Hashtags, like anything, can be used well, or can be the source of spam. Spam is defined by wikipedia as “the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.” Hashtags are free to create, and could be a marketing dream. Marketers appear to have forgotten that a “free hashtag” isn’t a one way street. Remember when Skittles thought that they would build a platform based on a simple feed? Walmart tried selling mom jeans just two short months later with a “twitter party” (more on twitter parties later), that ended with this (click the picture for a close up):

What’s most shocking though, is that all these months later businesses still haven’t learned. Recently Maria Bailey used the hashtag #WashThemGrow to sell Suave baby soap, but when people asked about the toxicity and the facts surrounding some of it’s ingredients, the twitter party shut down and this was posted about 24 hours later (*eyeroll* I know). I know that Corporate America moves slowly, but this chugging along is ridiculous. Learn something, learn now.

Hashtag parties are spam. Jessica Smith recently wrote that “hijacking a hashtag” is spamming people. I would disagree. The corporate creation of a hashtag is incredibly intrusive. Businesses should be thrilled and honored if they get mentioned on twitter, why on earth would they feel like they have the right to a free focus group? Further, I’d argue that if you actually look at these “parties” it’s the same group of 100 women every week. Can’t you just send them an email? It appears that they are willing to sell just about anything to each other.

Every Friday Twitter becomes unusable to me. I love the way #FollowFriday began, but (to borrow a phrase from Scoble) it has devolved into a mess. I can’t see through the lists of names to actually get to the content, and I don’t want to unfollow people for just one day. May I kindly suggest that if you use #followfriday that you limit it to just one person and also give us all a reason that we should follow them?

I’d like to suggest we all take a page from the Twitter Handbook, listen and love. It’s incredible that Jack‘s interest in the routes of New York City messengers could bring about Twitter. I know some of y’all don’t recognize the import of Twitter, but those newfangled telephones were considered pretty intrusive too. In 1876 folks just hated that darned thing. Much like twitter, they started out as a party line. I think twitter lists and DM’s have brought us closer to the Baby Bells.

Again, if you can look at the internet and see it as one gigantic party line, well, you’d see that Hashtag Parties alienate more than they embrace. They serve the same small circle of potential customers each week, and they are seen by the rest of the community as corporate sponsored spam.

The reason that people are hijacking your beloved hashtag is because it irritates them. I know that sometimes we look at our own work, and can’t see the flaws. This isn’t bad, it’s normal. Sometimes an outside observer is needed. #Journchat is never spammed, why? Because #Journchat brings immense value to the people who participate in it, and (people like me) who simply read the stream either live or later. The world doesn’t owe you anything, and Twitter is a place that recognizes and quantifies that.

Have I said it enough ways?

If you’re having a party conference, by all means let people pick a hashtag, but if your party only lives on twitter… well, congratulations, you are a spammer.

UPDATE: AdAge has an interesting and related post: Do People Tweet About Brands More Out Of Hate Than Love?

I got an email about a nanosecond ago. This is the subject line

Caught!!!!

The email is from my mom, and included no text, just a link to this story.

An anti-gay California state senator was placed under arrest for drunk driving after leaving a gay bar. A male passenger was in the vehicle along with the lawmaker was not arrested, reported Sacramento CBS affiliate Channel 13.

State Sen. Roy Ashburn was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol at about 2:00 a.m. on March 3 when his state-issued vehicle was observed being driven erratically. The driver, identified as Ashburn, was taken in and charged for driving under the influence. Channel 13 reported that unidentified sources said the senator had been at Faces, a popular gay nightspot, prior to his arrest.

You can read the whole story here.

This week on Momversation Asha, Karen, Maggie and I got to talk about sexual abuse. Yeah, lucky us.

I can’t just present this video to you without some back story. I grew up in Manhattan Beach, Califrornia. In 1974 my mother took me to The McMartin Preschool for an interview. Something dropped or broke (that I don’t recall) and I said, “oh shit”. My brother and I were not accepted into Manhattan Beach’s best school, and instead we went to the co-op nursery school.

The Manhattan Beach of my youth was a very small town.

In 1983 and 1984 my friends were questioned about abuse. There were dolls, and police, neighbors’ yards were dug up. Every parent who ever buried a pet rabbit was worried, and McMartin was whispered everywhere. My neighbor was two years younger than I, in the weeks between her “interviews” she pulled out all her eyelashes. She was twelve.

Ultimately the McMartin’s were convicted, parts were overturned, some were dismissed, and everyone’s lives were ruined. The entire South Bay lived under a shroud.

Right now the town of Lewes, Delaware will experience the same issues my hometown did. Every time you look at a child of a certain age, you’ll think, am I allowed to touch him/her… hug, handshake, wave? In addition to the unspeakable pain of the children and parents directly involved, Dr. Earl Bradley raped his hometown. He stole their ability to trust, even if he didn’t touch their children.

With that, I present to you, this week’s Momversation.

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This morning I brought Jane to the doctor, she has a sore throat. As we were waiting for the doctor to come in the room, I was on the telephone with another mom who is an independent contractor. She was saying how she felt like a bad mom when her kids get sick and she can’t take the day off. Well, it’s just a feeling. Since when do we cater to feelings?

The really bad moms seldom doubt their actions.

My friends and I, on the other hand, are swimming in self doubt. That’s why we connect online and in person to share struggles and strategies, we educate ourselves, we keep up on the latest research and we take that mixture of academia and practical experience, twirl it around and the result is homespun wisdom. Though mothering can be challenging, most often it’s wonderful, and though it can be isolating, we still have that isolation in common.

As I was leaving the pediatrician with my daughter a mother was walking in. She was pushing her stroller, and crying. The baby was in the infant seat, a pink blanket draped over the whole thing, so I couldn’t see. Did her daughter have a birth defect? Was she terribly ill? Well, she couldn’t be terribly acutely ill or they’d be in the hospital, right? Maybe the baby was up crying all night, and now Mom was going to cry all day? I’ve certainly lived through that scenario.Maybe her baby needed surgery. Handing your child to the anesthesiologist will shave a few years off your life.

What makes a thirty something year old woman walk down public hallways crying?

Motherhood.

Really, we do our best to do this well. Most often we’re pretty darn good at it, and other days we walk around crying in public.