Personality Tests

May 31st, 2010

I took my first personality test in junior high as part of an assessment to determine which elective “career path” I should take in high school.  The assessment may have been baloney, but the personality test was a fun glance into the inner workings of my psyche, and I’ve enjoyed taking them ever since.  In college, I only had time for elementary courses in psychology and sociology, but I love examining the human mind and social, cultural, and behavioral patterns as much as the next former psych guinea pig who actually enjoyed being experimented on by upper level students.

My favorite personality test is the Carl Jung and Isabel Myers-Briggs typology test.  In this questionnaire measuring psychological preference, there are 16 personality types and test-takers are rated on scales of introversion vs extroversion, intuition vs sensing, thinking vs feeling, and judgment vs perception.  I am an INFJ – an Introverted (44%) Intuitive (50%) Feeler (75%) Judger (78%).

Portrait of an INFJ

As an INFJ, your primary mode of living is focused internally, where you take things in primarily via intuition. Your secondary mode is external, where you deal with things according to how you feel about them, or how they fit with your personal value system.

INFJs are gentle, caring, complex and highly intuitive individuals. Artistic and creative, they live in a world of hidden meanings and possibilities. Only one percent of the population has an INFJ Personality Type, making it the most rare of all the types.

As part of Child of Our Time, a BBC project following 25 children over 20 years, there is a new Big Personality Test which questions participants not only on their psychological preferences but also on their childhood experiences, their physical health, and their relationship and job satisfaction. Researchers are hoping to determine if our personalities shape our lives or if our lives shape our personalities.

My results for this new test are below:

Openness: 94% (willingness to try new things)
Conscientiousness: 98% (dependability, organization, hard-working)
Extroversion: 60% (tendency to seek out pleasure-stimulating activities)
Agreeableness: 80% (sympathetic and consideration)
Neuroticism: 78% (response to stressful situations)

I found it interesting that I scored so highly in all traits, but the neuroticism sure didn’t come as a surprise!

After completion, participants are provided with a full break-down of their results and an explanation of how the researchers believe certain personality traits tie in with general life satisfaction and overall self-esteem. It’s a really interesting study, and I was happy to provide the researchers with a new profile to add to their pool of results. You should do the same!

Sex and the City 2 Underwhelms

May 30th, 2010

I gotta say I’m surprised that Sex and the City 2 underperformed in its opening weekend, raking in only $32.1 million, less than Shrek Forever After, the pointless forth film in the animated series, which made $43.3 million in its second weekend.  In NYC I saw hoards of young, fashionably-dressed cliques of girls waiting for sold out shows of SatC 2 in lines that stretched for avenues,  but then again, this is the city that never sleeps.  Perhaps the rest of the country has grown tired of the fab four and their endless exhibitions of hunky beaus and glitzy, high-end fashions.

With proceeds from Memorial Day on Monday, Sex and the City 2 could match the three-day, $56.8 million opening weekend of its predecessor in five days of theatrical sales.    With nary another chick flick in sight (unless you count the underwhelming Letters to Juliet), it’s not competition that’s keeping the audience away.  It’s more likely that the abysmal critical reception on Rotten Tomatoes played a part, especially compared to the first film’s lukewarm, but still half-positive, reviews (15% fresh versus 49% for Sex and the City).

Casual Sex fans like myself were disappointed with the first film, largely because it took two established, reasonably healthy relationships – Carrie/Big and Miranda/Steve (three, if you count Samantha/Smith) – and turned them on their heads,  all for the sake of two hours of feature film drama.  When I heard a sequel was being made, I was pretty sure all four ladies would be victims of relationship annihilation since sequels always seek to one-up the originals in terms of melodrama and spectacle.  Fortunately, the reviews I’ve read suggest that the SatC sequel is two times the suck but without destroying two times the relationships.

Unless my girlfriends and I make a date for cosmos and a sequel, I won’t be seeing the new Sex film in theatres.  I’d rather pocket the $12.50 and wait for the red-carpet roll-out to home video and premium channels.

Catching Fire

May 24th, 2010

I started composing yearly booklists in 2008, mostly to encourage myself to read outside of my usual genres to focus more on reading classics, non-fiction, and New York Times Bestsellers.  But just like the epic list fail of 2009, I’ve once again veered sharply from my booklist, and it’s a struggle to get back on track. The problem isn’t that I’m reading less, the problem is that I’m reading too much of the “wrong” thing, thanks to the lure of the Brooklyn Public Library, book club meetups, and irresistible YA book series.

Case in point: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games YA book series.  The first book made it on to my booklist after I read a glowing review in Entertainment reading, and the book was so good, I didn’t have the perseverence to hold off until 2011 to read the sequels, Catching Fire and the as-yet-unpublished Mockingjay (August, 2010).

I just finished Catching Fire, and like the first book in the series, I read it in a weekend and was compelled to immediately read it through again from the Reaping to the cliffhanger ending. Collins does right what other young adult authors like Stephenie Meyer and Libba Bray can’t seem to figure out – if you have 300 pages of material, make it a 300 page book rather than dragging it out over decades.  Collins writes concisely and with finesse, providing just enough description, dialogue, and internal monologuing to set the scene and the readers’ senses. Her pacing is phenomenal, and her world-building is effective without bogging readers down with details.  It doesn’t hurt that her very premise is one of the most gripping I’ve ever read in the YA genre.

In The Hunger Games, Collins conceived a dystopian futuristic world where 24 children are forced to fight to the death on national TV every year, and in the sequel, the heroine Katniss Everdeen learns that surviving the bloodbath of the Games has not freed her from the sinister clutches of the Capital and the tyrannical President Snow.  In the months since the events of the first book, seventeen year-old Katniss has become the symbol of a revolution, but like most teenage girls, she is largely preoccupied with her tumultous feelings for two (potential) love interests, and the desperate struggle to stay alive when forced to participate in the Hunger Games AGAIN.

What particularly impressed me about Catching Fire is the insight Collins has for the human condition and in particular her heroine’s psyche.  When Katniss reacts to emotional and sensorial stimuli, be it a stolen kiss, the forced alliance with an enemy, or the loss of a friend, she is completely believable.  She is a fully-formed, flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional character – and those kinds of YA heroines are few and far between.  Katniss is sometimes brash, occasionally naive, and often unlikeable, but I can’t help but care intensely for her and her rag-tag band of allies.

I’ll be reading Mockingjay before the year’s end.  And I’ll be on Team Peeta.

Ahoy, NYC at Sea!

May 23rd, 2010

Today, my fiance and I enjoyed a lovely afternoon sail aboard the Clipper City Tall Ship.  The views of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline from the water are really breathtaking – I highly recommend it!  Last fall we took a nighttime cruise aboard the luxury Yacht Manhattan, and later this summer we’d like to try one of the 3-hour cruises that do a full tour around the island of Manhattan.

Below are a few of the pictures I took this afternoon.  I really love the juxtaposition of the 19th century sails and the modern skyscrapers.

Prospect Park West

May 20th, 2010

I took a break from the Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to read Amy Sohn’s Prospect Park West for a chick lit book club.  Book hopping from the exceptional to the mediocre makes for a jarring juxtaposition, and it’s a shame that of the three books I’ve read for the book club so far (Death by Chick Lit, Austenland, Prospect Park West), none of them have been particularly good.

The chick lit genre is not my favorite, but there have been a few books in the past that I’ve really enjoyed, including Bridget Jones’s Diary, Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, and Jennifer Cruise’s novels. Prospect Park West was an interesting book to tackle because it’s a fluffy, frivolous novel set in the very real Brooklyn neighborhood where I currently live.

Sohn’s novel centers on four married, stay-at-home mothers – a sex-starved freelance writer, a klepto Oscar-winning actress, an obsessive (and racist) housewife, and a hasbian – a former lesbian who is now, more or less, into dudes. As a whole, the women are bitter, self-centered, and narcissistic whine machines who are immensely unhappy, despite their leisurely and privileged lives. And as far as protagonists go, they’re all immensely unlikeable. Sohn name-drops a lot in the book which is one of my biggest pet peeves in the most superficial chick lit books. She names real places and real people in the Slope and she doesn’t portray anything about the neighborhood in a flattering light.

Well, I may not be a bitter stay-at-home mom, but personally, I love the Slope. I love the rows of well-kept brownstones on the wide, tree-lined streets. I love the accessibility of the hundreds of quaint shops and restaurants that line 5th and 7th avenue. I love taking walks along Prospect Park West to the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden just beyond that. And most of all, I love picnicking in Prospect Park and watching hundreds of families with children at play on beautiful, sunny summer days.

As far as I’m concerned, Park Slope is the best of both worlds. It’s a diverse neighborhood and a peaceful escape from the crowded hustle of Manhattan which is only a train ride away.