Kimberly Welsh Must Be Stopped.

If any of you sees Kimberly Welsh, could you please pound her stupid face in for me? Thanks.

I know what you're thinking. You're all like, "WHHAAAAAAT? But you're Kimberly Welsh!" And to that I say, "I KNOW RIGHT?!?!" But sadly there are a lot of people who don't know, and therein lies the problem. Because it is often said that the only thing you have in this life is your good name. And mine has been stolen.

I don't mean it's been "identity-theft" stolen (not recently, anyway), but I mean I have a name-doppelgängerin, and she is a law-breakin', bill-not-payin' MACHINE! I know this because I started getting friendly phone calls for her in the first month I lived in my condo. This period in my life is also referred to as "That Time I Spent 4 Straight Weeks Walking Around Wild-Eyed Screaming 'WHAT HAVE I DONE?'" Homeownership was not an easy transition for me. Just to paint you a picture: my cat tore the blinds down in my bedroom within an hour of moving in. On the first night, the smoke alarm malfunctioned, which is why I ended up standing on a chest of drawers trying to knock if off the wall with a broom (I succeeded). The next morning, the cat perched himself atop a box, which was sitting beside an open box full of measuring cups and other cookware...and then he puked directly into the box with the measuring cups and cookware. On my way to the kitchen to wash cat puke from my cookery, I noticed that the ratio of ants to food in my dog's bowl was approximately "so many ants that you can no longer see the food". That afternoon, I heard a strange noise and realized that the microwave had turned itself on and was gleefully heating itself up, completely empty, as it continued to do every few hours until I finally just unplugged it.

In other words: things weren't going well at 7pm, when I received my very first phone call on my shiny new phone and a VERY angry VERY pushy person wanted to know how and when I intended to pay off the balance on my Sears card, which I had incurred by purchasing a $2,000 sofa over a year ago. This confused me, because:

1. Do I look like a person who buys furnitureat Sears? I have no need for a Craftsman sofa.

2. Do I look like would rack up $2,000 of debt for anything other than pizza, Midori, or eyeliner? Girl, please.

I was even more confused when the person on the phone insisted that I was definitely the person he wanted to talk to. The issue was only finally resolved when I gave him the last 4 digits of my social security number, thereby confirming that there are, in fact, multiple (2) Kimberly Welshes living in this town. 

In the intervening years, as that Sears card debt has been passed from shady collection agency to shady collection agency, and they have taken turns calling me every 3-5 days, threatening to take a baseball bat to my kneecaps. Over a sofa. From Sears. I've learned that when they say, "Are you Kimberly Welsh?", the correct answer is, "I am a Kimberly Welsh, but I doubt I'm the one you're looking for." And then I take the earliest opportunity to do my SSN trick and escape, Houdini-like, from their bullying nonsense. (Sidenote: Seriously - those bad debt collection agencies are SHA. DY. The government should do something about them, as soon as they're done beating the living crap out of the credit reporting agencies, but that's another issue.)

I never understand why they call me. The debt is now at least 5 years old, and she has evaded them this long.  Do these people genuinely think they're the first ones to search her name in a phone listing? Why has no one thought of this before? Do you really think that after all this time, it's as simple as calling that number? Really? Do some work, lazyface. 

But this isn't nearly as perplexing as the one (and only) (knock on wood) time I got pulled over. I had allegedly rolled through a stop sign, but it's very a much a he said/she said, to be honest. Anyway, I dutifully gave the officer my license and waited patiently for him to run my information. When he returned to the car, he said, AND I QUOTE, "I thought I was going to have to arrest you." And I thought, "Wow. They're really cracking down on rolling stops on barely-trafficked surface streets." He continued, "I ran your name, and there's a warrant out for your arrest." And I thought, "Damn overdue library books!" And then he said, "Yep, you're wanted for...

[WAIT FOR IT]

driving without a license."

Pause.

"But, um, sir...you're holding my license. That's my license. Right there. In your hand."

"I know. That's how I figured there's a different Kimberly Welsh..."

"Oh you have GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!!"

So please. If you are on Team Law-Abiding Bill-Paying Licensed-Driver Kimberly Welsh, and you know someone who can put their hands on Law-Breaking Deadbeat Pain in My Ass Kimberly Welsh, yank her deadbeat butt of that Craftsman sofa and turn her in to the authorities. 

Blubber and the Burbs

Wanna know a secret?

I'm not Carrie Bradshaw.

I'm not even close. When that God-forsaken crap was on the air and every woman in America was yelling "OMG! Her life is EXACTLY LIKE MINE!!!", I was licking orange Cheeto salt off my fingers and dumping Midori in my margaritas by the quart so I could get good 'n drunk before completing my work on "Little Matthew Vance", a rhyming children's book I wrote and illustrated, about a kid who has no friends and never gets invited to parties, so he tells his parents he's going to a party (so they won't think he's pathetic), but really he just goes into the woods and talks to an amphibian for fifteen pages. Hey - they always say "write what you know"!

Aaaannnnyhoo. My point is: there was never a moment, ever, in my entire life, when I saw a single parallel between Carrie Bradshaw's life and my own. And yet, the Cult of Carrie seems to have become such a basic part of American culture that everyone else thinks there must be something wrong with me if I'm NOT Carrie Bradshaw.

Hi. My name is Kimberly. And this ain't Sex and the City.

See, I am currently taking a hiatus from the improv theatre where I perform. I needed a little mental health holiday. But somehow, every time I say "I'm taking a break from the theatre", every woman within earshot hears "I AM NOW DEDICATING EVERY WAKING MOMENT TO THE HUSBAND HUNT AND WILL GLADLY MARRY THE NEXT PIECE OF PRIMORDIAL SLIME THAT LOOKS AT ME SIDEWAYS! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE GIVE ME ANY TIPS YOU HAVE ON HOW I CAN LOOK SEXIER, BE MORE APPROACHABLE, OR, MOST IMPORTANTLY, FIND AVAILABLE MEN!!!!"

I appreciate what these women are trying to do, but it's just not gonna happen. As a point of reference, I should tell you now that while no one has EVER said "Wow, you are so much like Carrie Bradshaw!" to me, a dozen different people who do not even know one another have said: "Holy crap. Tina Fey owes you royalties for basing Liz Lemon on you."

I don't want a purse dog, I'm not gonna go to church just to meet men, I would sooner go to an AA meeting than a "running group", I have a policy against straying more than 2 feet from the food table at parties, I categorically refuse to read The Rules, I don't wear makeup to the gym, I think the editors of Cosmopolitan should be tried at the Hague, I don't shoe-shop recreationally, I HATE dating, and no, thank you, I will not stop putting mayonnaise on everything.

Look, I'm not completely anti-men or anti-relationship. I've been in some downright pleasant relationships in my time, and even now, there's a guy out there I would not mind sharing my Cheetos with. But you know why I like him? It's because: he's fun to watch TV and/or shoot pool with. That's it. I don't like guys who hit on me when I'm out at a bar wearing a metric ton of eyeliner with a headful of gorgeous curls that smell like burnt hair (because FYI boys, that's what gorgeous curls are made of: acrid smell-of-death burnt hair). I don't trust guys like that. They don't like me. They like my eyeliner and my burny hair. Those guys would have no appreciation for my favorite pastime of yelling "EEEWWW!" and laughing hysterically while I run a neti pot through my nose. I want the guy who joins me in making fun of 2am infomercials. Because he can't sleep either, and neither one of us is getting up at 6:30 to go to the gym.

And I'm not going to spend my month looking for Mr. Right. Because the kind of guy who really puts the mayo on my tater tots, so to speak, is precisely the kind of guy you DON'T find by looking for him. So IF IT'S ALL THE SAME TO EVERYONE, I'm going to get back to doing what I want to do, boring and shut-in-y though it may be. I may not be Carrie Bradshaw, but at least I'm not a walking petri dish like she would be, and you can take that to my local American Red Cross blood donation center. Where they will vouch for me.

Lemon OUT!*

*copyright Tina Fey, no infringement intended

"You're Never Alone With a Phone"

Thus spake Mark Corrigan on an episode of Peep Show.  Nine times out of ten, I agree with Mark's pithy little phrases, but this time, he's way way WAY off. In my experience, he would've been better off saying something like "only the phone-ly" or "all by my cell-f". (Give me a break, it's late.)

I remember when text messaging first caught on. I bought myself an adorable little Sony Ericsson phone. It was pricey (compared to my previous phones, all of which had been free), but I didn't care because it was an investment. This wasn't just a phone! This was THE phone! The phone that would someday ring with the call that would change my life! My soulmate would call me on this phone! A major record label would call to offer me a contract on this phone! It had to be good, because it was going to be the conduit for SO MUCH amazing, life-changing, wonderful information! And when you factor in text messages, it would also be the hub of my incredibly active social life, with friends always calling and texting, wanting to hang out with me.

Yessir. I had high hopes for that phone.

In reality, of course, the only guy who called me on that phone turned out to be a douche. Not a single record label, major or otherwise, rang me up. I had so few friends that eventually I signed up for AT&T's daily horoscope service just to see what it was like to receive a text. Times were hard. The funny thing is that my life wasn't any different than it had been before; it sucked exactly as much as - but no more than - it had previously sucked. I had the same friends, did the same things. But somehow my previously satisfactory life had become an empty shell of an existence, and I had become a boring, useless pile of crap.

Madison Avenue bears some of the blame for this, of course. I mean, cell phone commercials are ridiculous, and they always have been. Invariably there's some model-handsome guy, standing in the middle of some HUGELY trendy city (usually Tokyo), at night, under a bunch of crazy neon lights. The gorgeous woman he's with moves a few feet away to pose so he can take a picture of her with friendly siberian tiger that has just finished crossing the street. Then the three of them decide they could really go for some sushi, so he looks up restaurant ratings and directions on his phone, but while he's doing that five people call and two leave voicemails and he gets twenty-five text messages from movie stars and one of the voicemails is from his boss so he has to pause for five seconds to design an entire Keynote presentation on his phone which he then sends back to the office in New York just in time for the alarm which tells him it's time for him and his girlfriend to board their private Concorde where he sits and listens to music that he downloaded to the phone while setting a new high score for Angry Birds.

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

It's hard to see a commercial where a phone does all of that only to buy one for yourself and watch it sit, silent and motionless, on your bedside table for four years. Every second that phone does not spend ringing and vibrating and bursting with incoming messages is a moment it sits in silent dismay, judging you and your entire social life to be tremendously inadequate. There are times when you could swear you hear it doing a big exaggerated sigh. I wish I could've made the Real Life Sony Ericsson phone ad. It would've consisted of me (then an unemployed 20-something in her parents' basement), sitting in bed next to an open bag of Cheetos watching Adult Swim all night long, occasionally picking up the phone, looking at it, then putting it back down. Cue single, lonely tear.

I hated those feelings of inadequacy, but today I'm grateful for them. If I hadn't spent so many lonely nights trying to wipe my salty orange thumbprints off that phone's keyboard, I would never have survived the endless parade of horrors that the iPhone has brought into my life.

I got my iPhone in February of 2010. I had been dumped almost exactly a month before, so naturally I was in a hyper-optimistic phase, meaning I shelled out for the best model they had at the time. Why? Because this was the phone that would someday ring with the call that would change my life! My soulmate would call me on this phone! A major record label would call to offer me a contract on this phone! It had to be good, because it was going to be the conduit for SO MUCH amazing, life-changing, wonderful information!

Granted, I have my own place now. And I have far more friends than I had back in the day. But just as I have managed to carve out something like a life for myself, the advances in phone technology have stayed one step ahead of my feeble attempts at personhood, and managed to leave me once again wishing the stupid thing had never been invented. The phone still doesn't ring, except when I owe the Red Cross a pint of blood. I do get the occasional text, but I'm not exactly struggling to keep pace with all the correspondence. And now I am not only being judged as boring and inadequate by every call and text I DON'T receive, but I'm also being pointedly ignored by four email accounts, the whole of Facebook, most of Twitter, the better part of G+, and, apparently, Bump. The iPhone sits at my side, day in, day out, staring me down and saying, "There is no one - IN THE WORLD - who wants to speak to you. No one has seen something funny that made them think of you. No one wants to tell you something. No one wants to declare their undying love. No one even wants to send you a spam email."

As if this weren't bad enough, I finally got talked into subjecting myself to The Final Insult tonight: I got the Find My Friends app, or as I like to call it, "DELETE THIS APP IMMEDIATELY". Here's how it works:
1. You request to follow your friend.
2. Assuming your friend grants your request, they may also request to follow you.
3. This is not like "following" on Facebook or Twitter; whoever you allow into your little circle of friends will have access to your phone's exact GPS location at all times, unless you disable the feature.
4. When you look up your friend's location, Find My Friends shows you a little Google Map with a dot indicating his or her position. It also offers you the option to message the friend in question or get directions to where they are. Curiously, it does not provide a one-click connection to a suicide hotline. That's a pretty massive oversight, if you ask me.

My initial concern was that this was a little too invasive, but you can stop the phone from transmitting pretty easily, so I figured what the heck! I hadn't counted on the real evil here, and it's not stalking. Stalking is the least of your problems with this app. The problem is that now my phone is not only capable of judging me in its silence, but it can also actively tell me what a total reject I am. See, once I installed the app and hooked up with a few friends, I played around with checking their locations to see how specific the thing could be (answer: VERY SPECIFIC). But then I said the most fateful words I've said in weeks: "Hm. I wonder what [name] is doing at [place]. Weird." I say these words were fateful because they piqued my curiosity and led me to check in again about thirty minutes later, only to find that [name] had subsequently gone to another [place], this one even more fun and exciting than the last! I should point out that by this time (10:30) I was already snuggled up in bed with so much anti-aging cream on my face I'm surprised all the wine in my stomach didn't transform back into grapes. As [name] continued his or her tireless fluttering from one awesome destination to another, I became increasingly depressed at my depressingly depressing existence. Even if it had occurred to me to go somewhere fun at 10:30 on a Monday night, I wouldn't have been able to because I have work in the morning! And even if I hadn't had work in the morning, who would've gone with me? Probably one of the many people who are always blowing up my phone to hang out. OH WAIT.

And as the sheer magnitude of my patheticism settled on my shoulders with a great big WHUMP, I was further alarmed to realize that someday - mark my words - I am going to open that damn app to find that a BUNCH of my friends are all out doing something fun together...without me. Sigh.

I yearn for the days when I could've sat blissfully in bed at 10:30 on a Monday night feeling smug about how incredibly youthful my Blood of Virgins Anti-Aging Cream would make me look, enjoying my soft, warm mattress, feeling perfectly OK with myself and my life. I wish I could go back to a time when I could be the most boring person in my entire circle of friends without having to be constantly reminded of that fact. But no. I'm stuck in the 21st century, stuck with my iPhone, and stuck with a 24-hour news stream that simply says "NO ONE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU". At least until they invent an iPhone my cat can use.

The Kwerky Guide to...The Edinburgh Fringe Festival!

It's August. And August has been the saddest month of the year for me for the past three years and counting. Because it's Edinburgh Fringe time. And I'm missing it. AGAIN.

If you've never heard of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I have nothing more to say to you. Next you'll be telling me you don't know what Eisteddfod is! Geez! You people should be embarrassed to call yourselves The American Society for Reunification with the United Kingdom! Wait, what? Oh... Just me? OK.

The Fringe is the world's largest arts festival. If you're not going to believe me until you see a bunch of crowd-sourced dates and statistics supporting that statement, you can check out the Wikipedia page. As for my personal relationship to the Fringe, well...we're very close. [Editor's note: Kimberly has never been anywhere near Edinburgh, let alone during the Fringe.] I found out about it back in 2008, when I happened upon that year's Guardian Fringe podcast (Live at the Gilded Balloon - still on my iPod). I was floored by the variety of people they trotted out to be interviewed and do snippets of their acts. Some were famous, some were not, some were hilarious, some were not, but everything was NEW. There's a spirit of innovation at Edinburgh - people come with concept shows where they do their act while cooking for the audience, or play 12 different characters, or do sketches set only in the Victorian era. It's fantastic! And everyone I absolutely worship as a comedy writer today has done at least one Edinburgh show, and a lot of them still go back every year.

If I ever get my damn passport renewed, maybe I'll get to go see it BEFORE I DIE.

But I digress. This is supposed to be a Guide To... post, so I'll tell you everything I know about Edinburgh, all of which was gleaned from podcasts, as well as the Twitter feeds and blogs of performers *at* the Festival. Where I am not. I can't emphasize that enough. I'm in Atlanta.

This is my town. Pretty, huh? Image graciously yoink'd rockmixer's flickr account on a CC license :)

This is Edinburgh, according to the internet. I wouldn't know;  I've never been. Image graciously yoink'd from kyz's flickr account, also on a CC license.

Things I Know About the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

1. There are no vegetables available anywhere.

2. It's insanely cold.

3. It rains. A lot. Like, all the time. Seattle - coffee + beer = Edinburgh

4. There are way more Australians than you might expect.

5. No one sleeps.

6. Everyone gets really sick and/or depressed.

7. College kids physically assault you with flyers everywhere you go.

8. There aren't enough venues for all the bazillions of shows, so some performances will take place in church basements, etc.

9. It costs a fortune.

10. In the midst of your darkest hour, you go do your show for 3 people, almost all of whom got in for free, it goes terribly, and then one of them writes you a nasty review. This was all brilliantly documented in a musical written and performed by some of my idols, which starts around the 16:45 mark of the audio on this page. (Do yourself a favor and listen. I can't even tell you how much I heart that thing. I always wish my fellow improv actors were familiar so I could do the "where's my mug" bit before shows.) (Oh yeah - and LANGUAGE WARNING!)

It sounds awful.

I REALLY want to go.

For now, I just have to say the same thing I say every year: "Maybe I'll get to go next year." In the meantime, I'll content myself with the usual voyeuristic obsession. If you'd like to know what the hell I'm talking about when I bring it up obsessively over the course of the next few weeks (and you know I will), you can probably find out at the Guardian's Fringe site, or current Fringe performer Michael Legge's blog (which, incidentally, makes for a highly entertaining read even when the Fringe is not on), or all the dozens of other podcasts and websites that will no doubt spring up and spout information until the end of the festival. Google it yourselves! Do I have to do everything?!?!