Verdict: have more sex

I'm tracking calories these days on weightwatchers.com.  Those of you familiar with Weight Watchers know that certain foods have certain point values -- which can be countered by certain physical activities with certain point values. Sometimes finding these point values involves research.

Today, while doing a Google to see what kind of calories a person can burn playing the piano (this site says 170 an hour), I accidentally typed into the search engine

"How many calories do you burn having sex?"

(Come on. Don't tell me you haven't wondered the same thing. Every time.)

Of course, such a number is going to be a moving target based on body types and types of actual movement, but I get the sense there is no way to calculate a good answer. The only close results seemed to be user-provided-content answer sites ... super reliable as they are. Like this example:

"About 4 and 5 calories per minute, but obviously it varies by how vigorous the sex is!"

I think this one from Yahoo! content was not really meant to be tongue-in-cheek, what with the scientific research seemingly involved:

"... the average person, according to webmd, is only capable of having actual "intercourse" for about ten minutes. Foreplay, for this same individual, usually lasts twenty minutes. So the total calorie burn while having sex should be around 30 minutes, especially if it happens every night. So ten minutes worth of sexual intercourse should burn around 58 calories while twenty minutes of foreplay should burn around 50 calories. So 30 minutes of sex for the average person should burn around 108 calories.

"I decided to find out how many calories I would burn just sitting on the couch so that I could see how many extra calories I would burn by having sex. Sitting on the couch, according to http://www.healthstatus.com/ for the average person burns around 120 calories an hour. So thirty minutes of sitting on the couch would burn 60 calories, while 30 minutes of having sex would burn 108 calories. So the total amount of extra calories I would burn by having sex every day is 48."

(A statement both sobering, depressing, and relieving, if true, considering how much I sit on my couch.)

However, if you really want to get an accurate reading, do visit this site, which breaks it down into extremely specific movements and situations, for example:

By Location (ex. on bar stool = 20; in rear of Honda Civic = 38;)
By Noise (ex. low growling = 8; urgent begging = 22)
By Possible Side Effects (ex. sliding around = 9; whiplash - 27)
By Position (ex. standing, partners equal height = 18; woman 1-foot taller than man = 90)

Among many, many others, many much more graphic.  Read on only if you really want to know.

(And if you do, that's OK. I kind of did.)

Anger (Warning: adult content)*

Somedays I get angry at my feet for hurting. Last night I ran hills, and today my feet just hurt all day.

Then I get more angry when clients take their accounts away from our firm, and I have to help them do it. I helped millions of dollars of assets move today.

And then Damien Rice, my favorite Irish boy, comes on the iPod with *(warning: adult content) "Woman Like a Man". Wicked guitar riff to start. D minor. Sassy. I'm sitting at the computer, closing accounts and icing my feet, grooving to the walking bass, getting by. Damien wails. The chorus is a relentless chant. I'm thinking

this is my song today. It is angry. It is me. I need to be this song.

I play it many, many times, maybe 20 or 30, which is what I do some days to distract myself. Not so much listening to the lyrics. Then, perhaps on the 10th go-round, I clearly recognize a phrase: "wanna get f***ed inside-out." And then again.

I listen more closely. Damien's got a mouth on him, to be sure. Lots of metaphors, but between the lines, clearly an angry song about sex. Definitely not your father's Marvin Gaye put-on-the-moves song.

Reminded of something the CFO said when we were dating, after I'd send him snippets of blog entries that were, as any good date story should be, edited for public consumption:

"I do like reading how you view me and us in our time together, knowing Grandma might read it, and as I've said, I wonder how you'd paint the picture if (you had) complete anonymity...."

This is not an anonymous blog. I wanted to write about this song's effect on my mood today, and I did work pretty assiduously to not offend people....Grandma and otherwise.

And am generally not a fan of angry songs about sex. (Really. Play me the Cranberries singing about lingering if you want to woo me.) Before today, I really didn't know any angry songs about sex. But today I spent most of the workday listening to an angry song about sex. It did help me corral my anger. Go figure.

It would have been more interesting, probably, to paint the picture according to the CFO's wonderings.

Rhapsodic conceit

When I play Johannes Brahms I think of one of my musician friends whom, not long ago, had several of us over to his apartment after we had already shared several bottles of wine. We drank a few more as he queued up the Ravel ballet Daphnis et Chloé, instructing us to listen to this "most beautiful piece." We hadn't listened a few moments before he threw his arms wide and called out to the ceiling, as if to dare those assembled, "I wish to make love!" He leaned back on the sofa, closed his eyes and began conducting his arms widely, swooping....making love, perhaps, to the air around him.

Ravel and Brahms are of different eras, but I can't think of a secular Brahms piece, either, that does not make me want to make love. I'm listening right now to the intermezzo #1 of Opus 119 in B minor...which starts delicately, with a push/pull of tension and suspension. Then the calm gives way to a hugely sweeping arpeggio in the left hand that grinds against chromatic suspensions in the right, driving upward. The flowing returns and builds through crescendo to silence. And repeats itself.

Brahms achieves this in his piano pieces: he simulates the human condition...an intermezzo as love-making, a rhapsody more like an argument. Always emotionally saturated. Sometimes it's as if he follows a thought through a brain and out through lips, where sometimes it catches an ear and builds to something grand, sometimes dissipates.

Thursday night I worked this intermezzo on the church piano for several hours. Listen to it. A dangerous piece to do alone on a Steinway, in a cavernous space with only a lamp for light, late on a cold evening. Heading home with all that melancholy shut in my chest...playing the piece didn't dissipate, rather re-initiated, a longing for something beautiful of my own.

How to tell it's time Karin needs a hug.

About 7:15 last night I hit up Mass General. There had been intermittent shooting pain in my left ankle since I finished a run Tuesday; the goal was to secure an x-ray to ensure there were no fractures or tears.

The Walk-In Unit waiting room was empty. The receptionist looked so unthrilled at my entrance that she forgot to process my co-pay. The doctor came out to usher me in as if I had awoken him from a nap.

Thusly weary, Dr. Ollendieck, who vaguely resembled the actor Hugh Laurie, did not choose to engage in small-talk (hallelujah!). He gestured me up to the waiting table and listened to me recite the symptoms. He asked me to remove shoes and socks and watched me do so without comment. Then he took my foot onto his knee and ran his hands over the tarsus and talus bones, with fingers as light as a Fred Astaire slide. Squeezed each of my toes. Traced each protruding vein. All the time in silence.

Sound erotic? (Well, remember the Hugh Laurie scruffy-beard look-alike thing....and, anyone, the great foot-tickler?)

Yeah, not so much. His three grown children and wife smiled down at me from the photo above his desk. My socks had been pretty sweaty. But it was entrancing, Dr. Ollendieck's continuous, benign, smoothing hands. For several moments, I looked down as he concentrated first on the left foot and then on the right, as a comparison, feeling, searching. I couldn't look away, and couldn't think of anything to say.

A reason I quest for a companion, sometimes, is that I miss that bare-skin contact. Sure, a swooping kiss on the clavicle that leaves me kissing the crown of his head. Or something as innocuous as his fingers resting in the cup of my palm as we walk down the street. Or his hand moving from the stick shift to my knee, driving me home from the bar.

Sigh.

By the way, no x-ray was prescribed. Dr. O didn't find anything outwardly wrong.

The 101 (Warning: adult content)*

Perhaps this fixating on the number of blog posts is now officially tiresome on the third try. But hey. Today was another market tanker. The stomach ailment remains despite introducing Pepto Bismol into my diet. Dirty laundry remains unwashed and lying in piles across my bedroom floor. This girl is NOT in the mood for romancing. Much less writing about how nice it would be, on a cold October night, to know someone waiting at her apartment.....cooking dinner and changing the cat litter.....drawing a hot bath....

Sigh.

With this cynicism in mind....trying to ease the pain of another round of account liquidations this afternoon....I came across Daily Intel, the gossip blog of New York Magazine. Like any blog, it features routine updates along with an unmoderated reader comment section. Except that in this case, the commenters become the bloggers in a weekly feature known as "the sex diaries".

Yes. Blog commenters are invited to submit, for publication, a journal detailing their sex lives over seven days. Today, it was the "Self-Obsessed, Emotionally Detached Hedge-Funder". Twenty-five, heterosexual, single, male, harboring issues with anxiety, anorexia and sleeplessness and the variety of drugs he takes to combat all three. Feeling no irony, evidently, in printing this on the second day of a market free-fall.

*(When I suggest this is for adults only, I mean it. It is, after all, a sex diary, folks, and the man did have sex a couple times that week and explains it graphically one of those times. So enter at your own peril and level of comfort.)

Perhaps I post this to show where my relatively tame romantic quests fall on the spectrum of the blogosphere. Or that it is difficult to find a date with a normal, honest man in the city while working in finance. Or to relate to the fact that the author spent three occasions that week on Facebook, ogling his ex-girlfriend's profile and hating on her new boyfriend. (We've all been there, I'm sure.)

Or found myself oddly distressed at the following comment, coming after a particular outing with a new girl who obviously wants to see him:

"I get a call from her again while I'm at work. This is not good. Though it makes me feel great when I know someone wants me, because I'll never let them have what they want. "

As I always say, it's rough out there. These are some of the availables, folks....