Author Archives: Chelsea Kennard

Secrets to a Lasting Relationship

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Tonight I was able to enter into a very informal but interesting conversation with GRF Andrew and Antonio and other Rose Scholar participants about what science has to say about the secret to a long lasting relationship.

Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship. Except, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages according to the statistics.

Much of it comes down to the spirit couples bring to the relationship. Do they bring kindness and generosity; or contempt, criticism, and hostility? It was found that contempt is the number one thing that tears relationships apart. Kindness on the other hand glues couples together.

There’s a habit of mind that the masters of love have which is they are scanning the social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully. Disasters of love are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes, ready to critisize them.

Research has shown that kindness is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated. There is a great deal of evidence showing the more someone receives or witnesses kindness, the more they will be kind themselves, which leads to upward spirals of love and generosity in a relationship.

In the discussion we determined that this does not just apply to romantic relationships, but kindness can be the glue in other relationships such as friendship.

There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait, either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. So tomorrow go out and exercise this muscle by spreading a little kindness.

Discrimination?

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The Intergroup Dialogue Project at Cornell prepares students to live and work in a diverse world, and educates them in making choices that advance equity and justice. At this meeting I was in a room with students of different backgrounds, interpretations, and experiences which made the topic, racism and microaggression, a very interesting eyeopening discussion.

In the beginning of the discussion, there was a skit that was acted out, that contained a micro aggression and we discussed thoughts and feelings about what we just witnessed. It was demonstrated that sometimes we don’t know how we should respond to such incidents because they are more subtle and not overtly racist.  But sometimes people engage in covert racism, which can involve statements, and behaviors that are more subtle or aversive, where the person engaging in the behavior is not aware that the behavior is racist or discriminatory and would feel offended if you labeled it as such.

These more subtle forms of racism are called microaggressions, and the dangerous thing about microaggressions is while they may be small intentional or unintentional offenses, they can accumulate and become burdensome over time for those who experience them.  One of the most insidious features of microaggressions is that sometimes it is hard to confront because it is so subtle.  Because they tend to involve small incidences or indirect insults, it is easy for the perpetrators to dismiss or negate your perception that the behavior or comment was racist.  After a while, you may begin to question whether you are being overly sensitive or imagining things yourself.

This is just one extreme problem that the Intergroup Dialogue Project is trying to combat, by increasing understanding of social identities, exploring the effect of social inequality at personal, interpersonal, and structural levels, to develop students’ skills to work effectively across difference, and to strengthen individual and collective capacities to address social justice issues.

 

Poisonous Plants Interpreted

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Recently I attended the art exhibit in Rose Dining Hall, showing print media by Professor Page and Teaching Assistant Lia Sutton’s students. The book Wicked Plants by author Amy Stewart inspired this semester’s project.

The class visited the Robison York State Herb Garden in the Cornell Plantations and was introduced to all the poisonous plants in that garden. This portfolio is a exploratory investigation of this subject, with artist translations in visual terms representing the plants in various situations and scenarios based on the tours that the students engaged in. The works of the portfolio contains prints of various mediums including lithography, screen prints, relief prints, mono prints, and stenciling.

There is a saying that many have subscribed to for generations, and have accepted it as fact. That saying is the familiar pearl, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ We understand, through this widely used statement, that the concept of beauty is such a relative one that its defined terms change with whomever is actively doing the perceiving. What holds beauty to one, may not to another. It is a simple enough idea, and apparently resonates truthfully within so many of us for it to have grown to become such a popularly uttered phrasing among the masses. So if a concept such as beauty, can be that subjective, can the same be said for a medium of largely interpretative and conceptual products? I am speaking, in this case, of art.

Art is more than the perception of beauty, and the intention of the creator, it is about interpretation. Without the interpretation that each person is moved to uncover about a piece of art, it becomes a stagnant work. It was extremely interesting for me to discuss with fellow attenders of this event about their interpretations of the pieces.

Art is a beautiful part of the world we live in, whether we read about it, create it ourselves or simply appreciate it. And don’t be fooled into thinking art is something you’d only find in a gallery or exhibition; it’s everywhere, shown in the students ability to capture poisonous plants.

A Sea of Glass

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Last night’s Cafe was unexpectedly fascinating. Drew Harvell spoke about the marine environment, but approached it not from the expected negative images of overfishing, pollution, and increases of coastal population. She focused on the bizarre forms and colors of marine life, and shared her passion of the intriguing life forms in the ocean. A tool that has been used to truly capture the intricate ocean life forms, is the Blaschka glass collection. The majority of the talk consisted of a screening of the short documentary, Fragile Legacy, which outlines the Blaschka art and how the glass acts as a time capsule to compare the ocean from the 1860s, when the glass was created and the current ocean environment. It is an incredible film, and is currently a finalist in five film festivals.

What truly fascinated me was the glass itself. My father is a glass blower at the Corning Museum of Glass, and we have a glass studio at my home, therefore I am quite familiar with the process of lamp working and glass blowing, and how difficult creating this art form can be.

What influenced Leopold Blaschka and Rudolph Blaschka to take on this intricate challenge of creating some of the most talented glass pieces to date was the ways of exhibiting delicate specimen. Displays of stuffed and mounted wolves, bears, and birds posed in life-like positions were fairly easy to achieve, but exhibiting delicate specimens such as flowers or sea invertebrates posed a distinct challenge.  Botanical specimens could be pressed and dried, creating a flatter, less colorful version of the original plant, but invertebrates had to be preserved in jars of alcohol, which faded the colors and caused the bodies to gradually collapse.  Neither option was terribly inspiring for the public and certainly made the scholarly study of the specimens more difficult.

They made thousands of intricately worked, carefully detailed glass models of invertebrates and botanical specimens for the use of teaching aids and in exhibits, including the famous collection of glass flowers at Harvard University. What truly amazes me is how accurately and finely they captured every detail. They did this so well, that Drew Harvell took on the challenge of identifying marine life from these glass pieces.

It is truly saddening that throughout the years many of these pieces were broken in storage, but through the work of restoration, some of these pieces will be able to be appreciated once again.

 

Simple Starts

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Joined by Marshall Curry, the two-time Academy Award nominated filmmaker, lead to interesting dinner conversation. Giving background on his road to becoming the renowned success he is, I could not help being in awe at the simplicity of his start. Not having any background or family connected to the film industry, he discovered his interest in documentaries, and simply bought a camera one day and read the manual.

He then proceeded to make an election film for Cory Booker, who was at the time running from Mayor of Newark. After shooting 200 plus hours of film following the election, Curry cut a trailer and attempted to receive a grant to finish the movie with no success.

Without this grant, he decided that he would have to learn to edit himself. He enrolled in a weekend class about editing and edited his footage for about a year and a half. Throughout this time period it was trial and error, and his only goal was to finish the project, not knowing the success to come.

Once he finished his editing, he took it to POV, who enjoyed it and provided another editor for the film. After this, Curry submitted it into Tribeca Film Festival, winning the audience award and then the film was nominated for the Oscars. This was the start of his career.

One statement that struck me was his motivation behind his films. He stated that he doesn’t make documentaries about what he wants to say but about subject matter that he wants to learn about. I thought that this was a very different humble approach.

Through his experience, he took away a very valuable life lesson that applies to many things in life, and hearing him say it was a good reminder. He said that he became more comfortable with the idea that it’s not going to be correct the first time. You have to keep building, after it topples down, until you create the final product.

The Bubble in which We Live

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A panel lead by Shanjun Li, Greg Poe, and David Wolfe, enlightened the audience on the environment and its delicate balance. We have to make informed decisions to combat the problems that we face due to human activity impacting the environment. A question that opened my eyes during the panel was,

“Who here are users of lake source cooling?”

At the time, no one raised their hands because not a single student in the room was aware that lake source cooling is the mechanism that is used to cool West Campus. It made me think about the importance of being informed in order to make educated decisions.

This panel reminded me of a book that I have recently read called “The No Impact Man” written by Colin Beavan. By reading the book you follow the Manhattan-based Beavan family as they abandon their high consumption 5th Avenue lifestyle and try to live a year while making no net environmental impact.

Everyday we are faced with small inconveniences, and we will go to great lengths to make our lives more convenient because we believe that this is directly related to our happiness. Colin Beavan did the opposite, entering a lifestyle experiment, that plunged him into a year to try an maintain as close to no net environmental impact as possible. This entailed a lifestyle that produced no garbage, travelling in only ways that emitted no carbon, and living a life that would cause the least environmental impact regarding food choices.  He examined how truly necessary the conveniences that we take for granted are and how, in their manufacture and use, they hurt our habitat. In addition, he analyzed how much of our consumption of the planet’s resources actually makes us happier and how much just deters us. Interestingly, Colin Beavan found that, “Environmentalism is not about the environment. It is about people. It is about a vision for a better life-for people.” Early in this experiment, he realized that the argument, that all of the food packaging helps cut down on the time people have to spend taking care of themselves and their families allows them more leisure time, is false. “In my family’s life, the convenience doesn’t mean more time for hanging out together. It means more time for work. After all, so many of us shuttle between two jobs and break our backs twelve hours a day and more to pay for all this “convenience.””  He realized that this “high standard of living” is not the same as a good quality of life, and he demonstrated that by making individual lifestyle adjustments, collectively we can improve our lives and the lives around us. The inconveniences that he intentionally put himself through, taught him that progress and advancements “are magical when they are created and done, but once we become addicted to them, once we have to have these things in order to feel just barely satisfied, they aren’t so magical after all.”

One important aspect of inconvenience demonstrating a lesson, is whether the learners, keep the lesson or if we fail to truly learn anything. In No Impact Man, Colin Beavan, changed the way he thought about our lifestyles, by the inconveniences that he subjected himself to. “Changing the people around me-the unforeseen consequence of individual action-is still one more result. By continuing to think about these issues and doing my best, even if it’s not as extreme as during the project proper, I continue to change the people around me.” He did not allow his lifestyle experiment to simply end, but he applied the lessons that he had gained and realized that we can all change the people around us by changing ourselves.  He continues to strive for this, because he realizes that suggesting that “collective and individual action are mutually exclusive, or even different, is wrongheaded and dangerous. It ignores the way cultures change, the responsibilities of citizens, and our potential as agents of change.” 

What might seem inconvenient to the point of absurdity instead teaches lessons that all of us need to learn. We as individuals can take action to address important social problems. One person can make a difference but we can only make a difference if we are informed.

 

Eluding Arrest

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Professor Ohlins gave a very informative discussion regarding international criminal law. Among the many topics that were addressed, one I found very shocking was the event of the South African government defying the longstanding arrest warrant for Mr. Bashir, who again eluded international prosecutors seeking to try him on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide related to the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan.

His departure dealt a serious blow to the international court’s six-year campaign to bring him to justice. Mr. Bashir’s plane took off just as South Africa’s High Court was holding a hearing on whether the government was required to comply with the international court.

Mr. Bashir had left South Africa, a surreal scene that underscores the limits of the international court’s reach.

I believe that the government’s failure to arrest Bashir is inconsistent with the Constitution.

The case strikes at the heart of a global dispute over the international court. Since its creation in 2002, all of the court’s investigations have focused on Africa. But it lacks a police force to enforce its rulings and must rely on diplomatic pressure and the cooperation of members to ensure that its rulings or indictments are enforced.

African politicians have long said the court unfairly targets African leaders and nations, arguing that it overlooks crimes committed in other parts the world. The court’s supporters point out that most of the cases it has pursued were brought by African governments.

William Mokhari, a lawyer for the South African government, argued in the High Court that Mr. Bashir enjoyed immunity like the other African heads of state attending the summit meeting. Mr. Mokhari said the decision by the government to grant immunity to the visiting heads of state trumped its obligations to the international court.

What is very concerning to me is that South Africa tries to argue immunity for crimes against humanity. Regardless of who the leader may be or what the diplomatic considerations may be, we’re talking about heinous crimes committed under President Bashir. Given history to argue for immunity for those kinds of crimes is unthinkable.

The Poverty Industry

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Mark Weber, the co-producer of the documentary film Poverty Inc., joined us for dinner discussing poverty and the well intended aid efforts. The West has positioned itself as the protagonist of development, giving rise to a vast multi-billion dollar poverty industry, and the business of doing good has never been better.

Yet the results have been mixed, in some cases even catastrophic, and leaders in the developing world are growing increasingly vocal in calling for change.

For me, this discussion struck at the core of the traditional understanding of development and international assistance, and helped me see this topic in a new light.

Being a nutritional science major, my goal has always been to specialize in International Nutrition and Global Health including programs concerned with hunger, health, and food supply issues in non-industrialized countries.

I now understand that you can’t just enter a country and expect to supply aid. It’s not that simple, and there are many unseen effects, like displacing the local people that are already supplying assistance. Although you may have good intentions, and desire to “change the world,” many find an interest in international assistance because it is exotic, but you can not treat assistance to developing countries as a project or an addition to a resume.

A fellow student in the discussion asked, “What would be the first step of changing the world?”

Mark Weber answered by saying that Mother Teresa was asked a similar question.

She answered, “Go home and love your family.”

 

An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

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Cornell never seems to disappoint with the numerous facilities on campus. Although it is a trek up to the Cornell Orchards, the operation includes storage and packing facilities, cider press, research lab, and 37 acres of fruit plantings. From the latest selections to century-old antiques, the Orchards grow more than 50 varieties stretching out the fresh-apple harvest season. There are numerous apples for fresh eating but others are grown for use in custom-blended ciders, soon to be found in the dining halls!

In addition to apples, the Orchards grow peaches, plums, cherries, pears, grapes, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, among many others.

The apples are stored in a cool, low-oxygen environment to help keep the grown fruit fresher, longer, practices pioneered at Cornell.

Also pioneered in Cornell’s breeding program is a new variety of apple, RubyFrost. RubyFrost is the offspring of Braeburn and Autumn Crisp. In addition, the SnapDragon which is the offspring of Honeycrisp and an apple in the breeding program with fruit similar to Jonagold.

Seeing what goes into the production and growth of food, gives one a new perspective and appreciation for the food that we can easily access.