Leng-Lui.info

I think by now most people already know that I'm trying to totally turn my life around and find a way back into music because I really don't enjoy what I do at work. Auditing is not my calling. Seriously.

I figured out my main problem was a complete lack of available time. I say "available time" because well, I had time but I kept being so tired that I couldn't motivate myself to do anything. Even stuff I like. So, for the past year or so, I've been talking to various managers and partners at work, trying to find a way around this. And I'm really, really glad that I took the jump (and that EY has let me) to get a Flexible Work Arrangement. This basically means I don't work Fridays in off-season (i.e. Apr-Jun, Oct-Dec) anymore!!!

So why did I pick a Flexible Work Arrangement and not just take unpaid leave? After all, both of them result in me taking a paycut because I'm working less. Well, I had a couple of good reasons:

• A Flexible Work Arrangement means I won't go crazy because I'll get some more time off work throughout the year.
• I already kind of don't really take much of my annual leave so buying extra annual leave or taking unpaid leave isn't really going to do anything, because I'm just going to keeeeeeeep working.
• I have a feeling that if I took massive amounts of leave in solid blocks I'll end up either going on vacation or spending all the time procrastinating and doing nothing because my brain is going "YAAAAY I'M ON LEAVE I'M ON LEAVE". Neither of which is going to help me get to Broadway.
• Getting a week day off every week is kinda helpful. Particularly since I can now try and schedule appointments with people I need to meet or errands I need to run. Ever try meeting a uni lecturer on the weekends? It's hard enough convincing people to give up their time to meet with you; trying to ask them to give up their precious weekends just doesn't work.
• Getting time off regularly each week makes me much more conscious that I only have this one, precious day off and I need to make the most of it. It also lets me pace everything out so I can work towards my dream consistently. After all, muses can be fickle and I can't just sit around, hoping inspiration will strike at the precise instant I have a two week window blocked off with annual leave. And everybody knows, consistent practice makes perfect.

This is week two of my Flexible Work Arrangement. The first one was spent pretty much just recovering. Today, I spent the morning sleeping off some sort of weird headache/cold that's been lingering around for the past week and cleaned house. After lunch, I spent some quality time with my keyboard and came up with a few bars of...something...which I will post later...when it's in a more finished form. All in all, I feel like it's a good start, considering that today is the first time I've written any music in over a year because I kept putting it off.

Anyway. I signed up for Noteflight in the middle of last year when it launched but didn't really explore it until today. It's a pretty impressive web-based alternative to Finale or Sibellius and if you're just starting out and composing simple scores, you won't really need anything else. I'm using the free version at the moment, which allows you to create 25 scores and has some limitations on the instruments you can write for, but at this stage, all I need is voice and piano anyway, which is fine.

But you can do some pretty amazing stuff with it:

Now Taylor Swift's "Love Story" kind of bugs me in that I feel like its level of popularity is unwarranted for the kind of song that it is. It is well written, but rather repetitive and doesn't do a lot of interesting things harmonically or melodically. In other words, it's pretty much a song where you can predict where it's going. I'll give it some credit lyrically, since it tackles a common subject matter but from a different perspective and it's cleverly written but it still annoys me because of the prevalence of false rhymes used throughout the song. What is immensely irritating is that despite all of these factors, there's still something about this song which makes me - critical as I am - like it. I guess that's what makes it a great song.