I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside a friend who I met as a gangly 17 year old! Fortunately he’s no longer gangly but a project manager for the PNAN Youth Arts Festival. This is essentially a competition involving 3 categories – film, design and writing. The PNAN competition is to create awareness for youths involving a theme from alcohol and drugs perspective. Nick has done a hard job to encourage and bring aboard big name sponsors (EMI, Rolling Stones Magazine) to support and judge the winning entries. This is an awesome way to get your art exposed to big name industry people. Also you can score over $15,000 worth of cash and prizes. Not bad if you consider yourself a struggling artist, auteur, creator. Check out the website here:

PNAN Website

Having done a year of psychology and came out of that with the fact that IQ tests cannot test intelligence. So with this thought in mind, I prepared for the psychometric test. Google psychometric test and you can find dozens of sample test but none of them really match up to what the real thing is. I did a sample Quantas test which was very very similar to the real psychometric test.

There are 4 main components to the psychometric test I undertook – the personality, the verbal, the numerical and the diagrammatic. The personality test is choosing a scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree on a statement they put forward. This is meant to give them personality character build to ensure that they aren’t hiring depressed, lazy people. Seriously, a statement such as “I am constantly depressed” makes me wonder who in their right mind going for a job would put Strongly Agree? Well people do sometimes amaze you…

The next part is the Critical Reasoning test. First was the verbal test where you are given a passage, they give you a statement and you have to judge whether it is true, not true or unable to say depending on the passage. I had to read some of the questions twice because the way that they worded the statement is misleading. I nearly ran out of time for this one since I had to answer the questions in 19 mins.

Next was the numerical test which I found the most difficult. I have not done any difficult maths equation except for adding and subtracting since I graduated from high school – 3 years ago! The questions are anything but straight forward, and your mind is left to think of a way to answer the question. I ran out of time and guessed the last few questions.

Next was the diagrammatic and spatial test where you are given a set of diagrams and you have to determine the next diagram. This is what I excel at the most – probably because we are female and love deducing things. I did this test with over 5 mins left to spare.

Overall, I was not completely confident with the result, but then I get invited to the next round so something must have gone right, or it must have been my lucky day!

I don’t consider myself a great writer, or a writer at all, but I think the opportunity to hack into another wordpress design appealed to me. And in that spontaneous moments that stirs inside me, I decided to release some of my so called ‘knowledge’ into whoever will read this blog. I’m new to this game where I am quite usually am happy to sit along and be a reader of many many blogs that my igoogle is filled with.

The idea to call this blog Norwegian Wood is by far not based on ideas or some higher form of stupid wanky intentions that I simply do not care to justify. I like the sound of it. The Beatles have a song called Norwegian Wood and Haruki Marukami has a book called Norwegian Wood which is about the Beatles song Norwegian Wood. I intend to read that book as I am a fan of Marukami’s tales of spiritual/sexual awakenings/journeys.

The Beatles in their Norwegian Wood heyday

Haruki Marukami’s Norwegian Wood which is on my to read list

On the subject of being impulsive, I paid Borders a visit as I have come to realise that without uni I have a damn lot of time to spend – not really actually, I guess I like the idea of having time to waste. I managed to pick up some cheap foreign movies and some surprisingly cheap cheap novels. Bargain bin treasures included Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love and Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie. Scored!

One of the beautiful scenes from In The Mood For Love

A scene from Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live)

Penguin’s new take on popular cult novels is basically “intelligent books at a low price”. That price happens to be $9.95. Absolute bargain for Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear and Jonathon Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated! How can you go wrong with titles that are cult classics as well as quality design? That was the best $41.88 spent at Borders. Have a look at some of the delicious titles on offer for just under a lunch meal:

http://www.popularpenguins.com/