Salon.com > Anneli Rufus

Loaning money kills relationships

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:42:00 +0000

At this point in history, money holds such massive emotional baggage that asking Can I have some of yours for a while? or Will I ever get it back? are some of life's weightier questions.

And now, we the people -- underwater, unemployed and terrified -- are forced ever more into the position of borrowing and lending among ourselves. Facing increasing personal financial crises, many of us now gaze dollar-sign-eyed at those with whom we lunched and shopped and shared secrets in gladder times.

When friends ask friends for loans, what's really being asked? What's the emotional "interest" on such loans -- and can friendships survive them?

Ella Hodges had three kids and worked part-time for a law firm when her husband's business failed in 2010. For the first time in her life, she needed to borrow money. But from whom?

"I knew that my friend Bree had a lot of money, and I knew she would say yes," Hodges remembers. "She knew I had always been very fiscally careful, so she trusted me. But how could I put Bree into the position of worrying that maybe the payback might never come? How could I put that burden on our friendship?"

Are sperm banks unethical?

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:00:00 +0000

To offset law-school expenses, Ben Seisler spent three years donating sperm to a Virginia sperm bank. He recently learned that his donations have produced 74 children -- so far.

On the reality show "Style Exposed: Sperm Donor," set to air Thursday, Oct. 13, we learn that while Seisler donated anonymously, he later discovered the Donor Sibling Registry, a website created to help donor-children find their biological fathers and half-siblings. After posting his contact information and "donor number" at the DSR, he began receiving emails from mothers who had bought and used his sperm.

"I want to be available to these families," Seisler, now a Boston lawyer, says on the reality show. "I'm kind of curious as to what are these kids like."

When a friend asks whether he plans to attend 74 birthday parties every year, Seisler demurs. "They're not my kids," he says.

Aren't they?

How comfort foods work like Prozac

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 17:01:00 +0000

When the recession hit, you could hear the words buzzing from the cell phones of every restaurant consultant in America: "It's time for comfort food." But under the mashed potatoes and meatloaf lies a question: What does "comfort food" really mean? What about it actually comforts us?

Let's look at some big-time comfort foods: Fried chicken. French fries. Chocolate cake. When people talk about comfort food, the obvious explanation is that it's all about nostalgia and missing Mommy. But that's also cultural. Look at lutefisk, natto and the reddish-black blood sausage I was served once by a sad Belgian who took comfort in what struck me as something you might see in a hospital. And really, it takes more than this to create the rush of sensations that make us feel safe, calm and cared for. It's a complex interplay of memory, history and brain chemistry, and while some basics apply -- most of us are soothed by the soft, sweet, smooth, salty and unctuous -- the specifics are highly personal.

Sometimes you’re just glad they’re dead

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 18:26:00 +0000

When I was fifteen I loved my friend Rhonda so much that other girls said it was sick and my dad said she was a devil who had me under a spell. They were all envious, of course. They could not possibly be expected to understand. Rhonda and I went everywhere together, so we were together that day on the school courtyard when we met Derek. He was doing handsprings on the concrete, making it look easy. Rhonda nudged me, wearing her lit-up look of discovery: Lookit that guy! He was not her type. She liked blonde husky Teamsters no longer in high school; her last boyfriend had shot himself in the foot to get out of the Marines; tattooed on his arm was a pipe-smoking baby and the words BORN HORNY. Derek on the other hand was dark and feline. When he stopped jumping and sat down on a bench with a carton of chocolate milk, Rhonda cornered him in that smiling interrogate-a-stranger way.

So what's your name?
D-E-R-R-I-C-K, like an oil derrick? No?
Where did you learn those acrobatics?
Aren't you scared you'll slip and snap your spine? Would you be paralyzed?
If you got paralyzed, what would you do for fun?
Really? So paralyzed guys can jack off?
Who do you have for civics? Mr. White? Get this. His wife miscarried last summer at Disneyland. No, really, on line for the Matterhorn! It's true, they belong to our church, First Presbyterian!

One is (not) the loneliest number

Tue, 19 Aug 2003 15:33:00 +0000

Apart.

Such a simple concept. So concrete. So easy to represent on charts or diagrams with dots and pushpins either in or out. Yet real life is not dots. Some of us appear to be in, but we are out. And that is where we want to be. Not just want but need, the way tuna need the sea.

Simple: an orientation, not just a choice. A fact. To paraphrase that Boston song, more than a feeling. We are loners. Which means we are at our best, as Orsino says in "Twelfth Night," when least in company.

We do not require company. The opposite: in varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over. Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course the rest of the world doesn't understand.

Someone says to you, "Let's have lunch." You clench. Your sinews leap within you, angling for escape. What others thrive on, what they take for granted, the contact and confraternity and sharing that gives them strength leaves us empty. After what others would call a fun day out together, we feel as if we have been at the Red Cross, donating blood.

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Unpleasantly plump

Wed, 03 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

You could say anorexia is a tradition in my family, like oyster stew at New Year's or funny hats on birthdays. My mother is the champion -- a dubious distinction. Most days she does not eat between dawn and dinner -- technically, from night to night, or from sparse dinner to sparse dinner. A perpetual Ramadan.

She was, as she tells it, "born fat." In photos she is round-faced, miserable in taffeta, bulging in swimsuits next to her slim sister. When she thinks of childhood, which is seldom, catcalls leap into her head as if it was still 1938. Fatso. Tub. What her classmates called her she still calls herself.

That her mother -- a thin woman who shunned food -- brought home piles of dresses from the store to spare this child the shame of a communal fitting room strikes my mother as merciful.

At 30, illness nearly killed her but it left her slim. She marveled at her arms. And taught herself how not to eat. Today one of the worst things you could say to her is, "You look healthy."

She says being fat ruined her life. Today when she sees fat women, she shudders. "Tragic," she will murmur, or "I'll never eat again."