Halfway Through the Week, Let’s Enjoy a Bit of a Break

Hi Internet People,

It’s Wednesday, frequently the sleepiest day of the week and when I’m normally just looking for a little bit of down time to recharge my batteries. Admittedly me Wednesdays for me right now have been a bit busy, I’ve been helping out my mom’s bell choir and have had to go to their practices every Wednesday since the end of November. Now it really isn’t that much of a time suck, but it does mean my Wednesdays are tiring. For those of you who would also like a bit of relaxation today I thought I’d share some of my favorite things to listen to at work. It’s an easy way to find some chill while you still are actually working. Now this is all music I just listen to, I listen to podcasts, but those are way less chill than the music I listen to.

I have kind of diverse tastes, which means these are all over the place suggestion wise, but these are my top four things I listen to while I work.

Next to Normal: It’s a musical that deals with mental illness and a bunch of other topics that are pretty serious. Even though the topics are serious the music is just so beautifully written and with the version I have the performances are just so great.

Repo! The Genetic Opera: Less chill and a bit more rock and roll, I listen to the soundtrack all the time at work. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a movie about a future society where you can make yourself perfect by swapping out body parts under contract. Issue is if you can’t pay then you get these new parts repossessed. So many people are involved in this show, it will honestly surprise you just how many big names are in it.

Evil Dead: The Musical: Again not a super chill musical, but it is freaking hilarious! It’s a blending of things from the first and second original Evil Dead movies and it’s all set to music. There’s also a bit from Army of Darkness thrown in at the end. It’s just so funny, it will have you cracking up the entire time.

Carsie Blanton’s So Ferocious: I listen to this cd a lot and the music is so diverse. Carsie’s music has a very bluesy feel to it, but some of the music is also a bit more pop.

Find me on Twitter, @kleffnotes, on my kleffnotes YouTube channel, I write for The Nerdy Girl Express and run their Snapchat, thenerdygirlexp, and I post recipes on the iZombie Support Group site.

Talk to ya tomorrow,

Katherine

Some Happy Memories

Hi Internet People,

Today I am going to try and talk about fun and upbeat things, I think we all need a little bit of happy right now. I recently saw some tweets focusing on listing favorite things, some as daily ways of being positive and some just as one off lists. I thought that today I’d focus on some of my favorite memories. Admittedly these are in no particular order I’m just stream of consciousness typing.

Going to see Wicked: I have been able to see Wicked twice in my life and both times that I went were wonderful experiences that when I think about them never cease to make me smile. The first time I went my mom. We stayed at a nice hotel and ate a lot of delicious Greek food. I had listened to the music, but I had no idea what the musical looked like. When I went I was just floored, it was gorgeous and the performances were amazing. The second time I went I actually bought tickets for my mom and sister and my friend Bri came with us. Now I will say that I do remember two weird parts of this trip. The first is that my earlobes swelled super bad because I had just gotten a third piercing in each ear and they reacted really badly. The second was that the Glinda in this performance wasn’t as good as the one I saw the first time. Oh! And I had laryngitis and was chugging orange juice and eating jolly ranchers, someone told me it would help. I still had an amazing time and we had so much fun, even if I couldn’t really talk.

Going to the first ever Potter Fest: I totally had no clue this was a reoccurring thing now. Back in 2011 a group of students from the college I was going to were given the opportunity to present papers at this college in Pennsylvania. The entire thing was Harry Potter themed and we got to see Quidditch, plus a bunch of other really cool stuff. This was the first time I presented an academic paper and it was a wonderful experience that I enjoyed so much. I got to talk about Harry Potter with a bunch of other fans of the series and apparently this was just the start of a yearly event the entire town now puts on.

Being Ebenezer Scrooge in a production of The Christmas Carol: When I was a senior in high school I was cast as Scrooge in our fall production of The Christmas Carol, which was a massive surprise. I beat out the senior and junior guys and played a male character who literally never got to leave the stage. I had so many lines and I was ecstatic to get to memorize them. I worked ridiculously hard and I performed to one sold out audience out of two performances. It was one of the most amazing things I ever did and honestly I’m still so proud of this moment in my life.

Having my Orphan Black tweet read on After the Black and making Jordan Gavaris laugh: I mean this one is pretty self-explanatory, but it was amazing that people on Twitter noticed and immediately got excited for me. I also screamed and scared my dog I was so excited.

Okay, I have more memories that make me happy, but I don’t want to write too much so I’ll leave it at these four. I might revisit this and share some other moments that have made me happy in the future.

Find me on Twitter, @kleffnotes, on my kleffnotes YouTube channel, I write for The Nerdy Girl Express and run their Snapchat, thenerdygirlexp, and I post recipes on the iZombie Support Group site.

Talk to ya tomorrow,

Katherine

There’s an American Psycho Musical!

Hi Internet People,

I totally just found out that there’s an American Psycho musical and I really want to go see it. I haven’t been to see a musical in ages, okay, not ages, just a couple years. I saw Avenue Q with some friends and before that I saw Wicked, The Lion King, and then some random little musicals that were performed by local groups.

I have a bunch of musicals that I want to see still, but the two on the top of the list right now are Hamilton and American Psycho. The one about the crazy murderer is the one I want to see first, just in case you were curious. Apparently it sold out when it was performed in London and just recently announced that it was coming to Broadway. I don’t live that close to New York, but seriously I want to just pack up and go so that I can see the amazingness that I feel an American Psycho musical will be.

American Psycho is one of the movies that I randomly watch just because. Something about crazy Christian Bale is just so fun to watch, and just like Fight Club Jared Leto gets beat to heck. That isn’t something I actively look for, but somehow two of my favorite movies just involve Leto getting super messed up. Bale’s character, Patrick Bateman, is obsessed with music so turning it into a musical makes sense. I honestly haven’t researched it, I need to look up the music because I bet that YouTube has at least some clips I can listen to, but I’m hoping that some of the music from the movie shows up in it. I’ve read the book too, it’s a pretty hefty read, and is actually way more intense than the movie. Some super gross stuff happens with a rat that is just super disgusting to read. There are also some way more intense deaths that were altered ever so slightly for the movie because if they’d been kept as is it totally would have gotten an NC-17 instead of an R rating.

If you’ve seen the musical or know anything about it I would love more info. I’m going to do some researching this week because I would love to go see it in New York. You can comment below or tweet at me, @kleffnotes. I’m going to do some videos this week, one about Netflix original shows, but until that’s up you can check out my other videos on my kleffnotes YouTube channel. You should also totally check out The Nerdy Girl Express.We just started a t-shirt fundraiser, the shirts are really cool.

Talk to ya tomorrow,

Katherine