A short personal narrative followed by a punchy plug

At 14 or 15, spinning for hours every day in my dad's desk chair, reading these newfangled things called blogs, I came across Sarah Hatter. I loved her writing, and in my own impressionable way, I took from her words the following ideas:

1. I should read the works of Marcel Proust in their entirety. (Or, better yet, ask for the boxed set for Christmas and then proceed feel guilty about not reading them for the next 5 years! Which is what actually happened. So, not such a good influence.)
2. I should register my domain name through Blogger. Someday. Which I just did about a month ago, after 5 years of letting the idea sit around...so, good influence!

Sarah Hatter was pretty much one for one in my book, until I decided a little while ago to see what ever became of her. Turns out, she teamed up with her friend Wendy to put together a running compendium of incredible consumer goods, appropriately titled Awesome!.


Unless you all get tired of hearing scintillating stories about my young adulthood, I will someday divulge the sorted details of my past as a catalog enthusiast. However, all you need to know for now is that I love looking at photographs of wonderful things paired with breathless descriptions. Hence my continuing weakness for the SkyMall catalog in airplane seatpockets, and senselessly enduring belief that its products really will change my life.

But I'm here to report that Awesome! is much better than the SkyMall catalog. In fact, it's much much better. Not only do Sarah and Wendy scour the internet for beautiful and affordable work by independent designers—the kind that never seems to rise to the top of the Google rankings under "cute clothes," even though their work is exactly what I'm looking for—they also share a really peppy/sassy writing style. It's enthusiastic, but it's wry. And I like that. In fact, their short-personal-narrative-followed-by-punchy-plug style has been one of the main influences on my writing on dianakimball.com. (Clue: you're reading it right now.)

So I would like to announce that Sarah Hatter, and, okay, Wendy too, in the grand and fiercely competitive contest for my affections, are no longer one-for-one. They're one-a million. And guess what? They're winning.