Subzero Blue

Circe & The Song Of Achilles

I’ve never really been that into Greek mythology for some reason; I mean, I knew most of the Greek God’s names through one way or another, and I’ve always been a fan of the God Of War video games (the latest of which, was awesome), and have greatly enjoyed playing the board game Santorini, in which the Greek Gods give you extra advantages in the game; but I’ve never taken them time to read any books or watch many movies that tackle the whole mythology around them.

And then, a couple of months ago, while browsing through audiobooks to borrow through the CloudLibrary app, that the Oakville Public Library provides, I came across ‘Circe‘ by Madeline Miller, which I had heard quite a bit about, but wasn’t sure what to expect given the topic.
Anyway, I thought I’d give it a try, and see what all the fuss was about.

As soon as I started listening to it, I was fully blown away!
The writing style was amazing! I was immediately sucked into the story, the characters, the places, the events; I just wanted to keep going, getting deeper, following the thread of the story as it unfolded.

The narration of the audiobook, by Perdita Weeks, was great and very engaging too, and brought the book to life.

Post Job Interview Thank You Note: Yes or No?

I’ve been a LinkedIn user for a very long time, but mostly as a place to build out my professional profile, connect with people I’ve met through work, as well as for things like hiring and exploring new opportunities.

I never got into posting or consuming much content on there, even though it seems many now find it to be a great place to share content and interact with the people they’re connected to.

Interestingly enough though, every time I go to LinkedIn, and think of checking out some of the content people are sharing, I’ll come across some version of the following idea being posted by someone, with a ton of comments on it.

If a candidate doesn’t take the time to send a thank you note to the interviewer after a job interview, they won’t hire them and will dismiss their candidacy!

It always surprises me how many people hold the above opinion, and how many people agree with them.
What surprises me even more is that people apply this very generally to all kinds of positions and scenarios.

I never took the time to respond to any of these posts on LinkedIn, but it’s always been something that nagged at me and annoyed me, as I couldn’t disagree more with this generic rule.

Making My Way Back…

It’s been a long while since I’ve written anything on this blog; almost 3.5 years since my last post. But even before that, I had been absent and very quiet for years.

This has also extended over time to me taking a step back from many social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; and not being as active as I once used to be.

I’m not quite sure why this has happened. I’d probably blame it on life, the changes and whirlwind of events it puts us through; work, with its busyness and different ups and downs; or maybe time, or lack thereof, amidst the competing priorities of family, work, life, …etc.

But that wouldn’t necessarily be fully true.

Part of it is that I just didn’t feel like writing, and maybe more importantly didn’t feel like I had anything worth sharing or writing about.

My wife always jokes that I have this uncanny ability to make certain everyday things sound trivial. I wonder if, in some weird way, that’s something I ended doing to my own writing ideas too, just swatting them away as negligible or unworthy of putting out there in the world.

But I miss writing, especially on this blog. For years, it was a great outlet for me, a place where I could share my thoughts and ramblings about the world, comment on news or events happening around me, talk about some of the personal things going on in my life, or just dump whatever I found interesting around the internet.

So, I’m going go try to slowly get back into it, and step by step make it back to writing more, and just sharing whatever the voices inside my head keep telling me.

I don’t know if it’ll work or not, what frequency I might be able to post at, or if anyone will give a rat’s ass and read any of it, but I know that I want to give it a solid try, because I think I personally need to, and well, because I think that with all the craziness going around in the world, there should be no shortage of topics for me to comment on.

So here goes nothing!