Until I Looked

I zipped my fly, buttoned my jeans, and stared at that stupid plant. It was short, plain, and hadn’t had any flowers in the entire time it’d been there. It seemed like the kind of plant grown for the sole purpose of sitting on bathroom countertops like ours. Well, mine.

A Portrait

I wasn’t sure what I expected to find when I went into my grandmother’s old house. She’d only been dead a month, barely enough time for a very thin layer of dust to be visible on her ornate wooden furniture. It was so quiet inside, the dust almost like the delicate flurries that floated down outside. I lifted some blinds. The silence devoured the sound instantly. The luster of the wood still somehow shone through by more than just a trick of the light—I got the feeling my grandmother polished it more often than dust motes were able to find steady relationships, let alone settle down.

Recent grads should consider options before getting hitched

Originally published June 1, 2009.

Last weekend, I attended my first wedding of the summer. Even before that, I’d already seen photos from the recent ceremony of an old UIS classmate. The college grad wedding season has arrived just in time to take advantage of the lovely weather (before the humidity ushered in by June and July will obliterate it until almost November).

Every day, I seem to hear news of someone my age getting hitched, and I can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s the near-evangelism of the wedding ceremonies I’ve witnessed that puts me off. Maybe it’s the resounding proclamations of fidelity and finality. Maybe it’s just the perpetual lack of an open bar. Or maybe, it’s the feeling of life moving far too quickly that overwhelms me.

I notice engagements and marriages of my peers and in some cases, I’m happy for them. After all, these are their lives and their decisions to make. But I often can’t help but feel disappointed for one reason or another: X married someone incompatible whom nobody likes; Y, especially ambitious and intelligent, married and quit college; Z felt too old to remain single and settled for someone just to get the marriage thing done and out of the way.

Carrying over a relationship from high school to college is usually unsuccessful. College presents new opportunities to determine who you are, what you want from your life, and how to achieve those ends. You meet new friends, encounter new social situations, and develop new perspectives on your world. You’re not the same person you were when you graduated from high school, and that can irreparably change the dynamic of a relationship with your high school sweetheart.

In the same way, graduating from college is a leap into the unknown and the beginning of a search for the career, the lifestyle, and the ideologies that fit best with the person you’ve become—or want to become. It’s doubtful that most freshly graduated college students know everything about themselves, let alone the people they’ve decided to marry immediately following Commencement. Knowing someone throughout their college career doesn’t mean you’ll know them well even a year after graduation.

In order for there to be an “us,” there has to be a “you” and a “me.” By that I mean that a successful relationship needs fully-formed, well-developed adult individuals—people who know who they are and can support themselves independently. They can recognize and appreciate each others’ differences and retain them in the merger that is marriage.

For me, this means having non-mutual friendships, individual career goals, and some hobbies or interests that allow for personal “alone time.” It seems especially difficult to maintain an active pursuit of your own desires or even figure out what those desires are when you’re 22 and have to take your spouse’s needs into account.

And speaking of accounts, most graduates have little savings to their names when they have student loans to pay off and grad school waiting in the wings. The last expense anyone needs to incur is a wedding.

Relationships involve playing a lot of the “intuition game.”

Does this person feel right? Do I feel like we could be together forever? I certainly can’t tell you how to feel. But I might suggest that the game gets easier to play over time, as your intuition gets better. At the very least, I’d say you should postpone that big day until you can afford not to have a cash bar.

Chelsea is a senior in LAS.

Censoring domestic violence ad doesn’t fix the problem

Originally published April 30, 2009.

We get to see a lot of things on television: kissing, fist-fighting, blood, naked bodies, surgery. The most popular shows on television right now try to simulate the most graphic situations we can imagine in everyday life — law enforcement and medical treatment.

But when it comes to domestic abuse, anything close to “everyday life” is apparently too close.

This month, British charity Women’s Aid released a two-minute film directed by Joe Wright (who also boasts Atonement on his directorial resume) starring Keira Knightley as an actress returning home from a day of filming.

In her apartment, Keira’s live-in boyfriend confronts her, accusing her of cheating on him with her leading man.

Nothing unsafe for television yet, right?

And if British advertising watchdog Clearcast has their way, that’s where this ad will presumably end. Nothing intense, nothing thought-provoking, and certainly nothing like real domestic abuse.

The full version goes on to show Keira being slapped, grabbed by her hair and thrown to the floor by her boyfriend just before he begins brutally kicking her.

The ad in its entirety has been posted on the Women’s Aid Web site, YouTube and has been shown in British theaters. But Clearcast has deemed the ad too violent for mainstream television viewing.

News flash, censors: that’s the point.

Domestic violence really happens every day, unlike some of the other explicit things we see on television. According to statistics listed on the Women’s Aid website, one in every four women will be a victim of domestic violence, and one incident of domestic violence is reported to the police every minute. The Knightley ad uses the most powerful of these statistics: that two women die every week from domestic violence.

Yes, the violence depicted in the video is disturbing. By its very nature, domestic violence is disturbing, and depictions of it should rattle us to our cores. As spokeswoman Lucy Brown said, Women’s Aid constructed the ad around anecdotes from women who had experienced domestic violence themselves.

Running the ad on television brings the horror of domestic violence into the homes of people who thankfully haven’t faced it firsthand, so that they are made to acknowledge its existence and potential severity. And with the economy in its current state, there’s no better time than now to initiate such an ad campaign.

Susan Miller of the Rose Brooks Center in Kansas City, Mo. mentioned in the Kansas City Star Monday that in the last year, her agency has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of victims seeking assistance and in the lethality of domestic violence cases. Miller suggested that employment layoffs aggravate domestic violence situations as they force the batterer to be at home more often, but also because victims feel as though leaving will render them unable to support themselves financially.

If people consider the influence of the global recession, it becomes clear why Women’s Aid would ask for small donations from viewers instead of aiming the Knightley ad at a smaller demographic and listing a help hotline phone number. Enacting widespread aid programs takes funding and the attention of those who aren’t victims. When the best way to catch the attention of television viewers is realism, Clearcast’s mandate that the realistic portions of the film be cut frankly suggests that they either don’t believe domestic violence is a problem in Britain or that they would like to discourage the public from supporting women’s assistance organizations.

Despite the massive number of online views the Women’s Aid ad has accumulated, it’s critical that it reach televisions and living rooms across Britain (and honestly, we could use something similar in the U.S.). For women and children in violent households, there’s no Clearcast to blow the whistle on what’s “too violent.” Censoring the ad — or rather, promoting voluntary ignorance — will not make domestic violence disappear.

Chelsea is a senior in Creative Writing and English.