Selenium - using jquery locators instead of xpath

I'm writing some selenium tests and find myself doing stuff like this a lot:

  @browser.click("//div[@id='four-col-bd']//div[contains(@class, 'column')]//a")

In this case i want to click on the first link in the first column in a div that has a group of four columns in it.

I'm thinking it would be nicer to use jquery-style dom element selectors for this sort of thing...can anyone think of a way i could lever it in there?

BTW, in case anyone's wondering, i have been using the selenium ide to generate test scripts but i find that the link locators tend to be too data-specific: that is, the ide records that you clicked on a link by saying "link=<link_html>", where link_html is the visible text in the link. This seems too fragile and data-dependent, that's why i'm trying to generalise it a bit to use the page structure instead.