sucker for a beautiful woman

As many of you know, I work at a glorified homeless shelter. This means, among other things, that I have a front row seat for an ever-evolving soap opera cast by the ill and addicted of Portland. The latest drama: a relatively hot young woman has moved into the women's shelter and all the men are tripping over their nutsacks to get this woman's attention. Sitting at the desk and watching these guys come crawling out of the crazy wood-work (I mean, there are guys who are usually so strung out on heroin they hardly know where they are... and even THEY are suddenly jumping up and offering to fetch this woman coffee, buy her a soda, etc...) -- it's really amazing.

And, of course, on further reflection I have to acknowledge that I am EXACTLY THE SAME. I like to think I'm slightly less obnoxiously obvious about it, but it's true. Throw a woman I find attractive into my usual routine, and my urge to swarm around her is no less potent than those sharks in the tank at work. For example, when our new case manager started a few months ago... hominahomina, that chick is hot! I ended up having a couple of very unprofessional conversations with my coworker (the male gigolo) Simba about her. I'm not proud. It's just who I am.

Which leads me to this picture:


This is Sandrine Bonnaire (hopefully the picture will actually show up and isn't copyright encrypted or whatever). She's a French actress who stars in a movie I just finished watching called "Intimate Strangers." It was a weird but interesting movie about a woman who accidentally wanders into a tax office and starts spilling her guts to a lawyer instead of a therapist. Rather than correcting her mistake immediately, the lawyer sits there, quite stunned, and can't turn her away. I can appreciate his dilemma. I'd have a hard time turning her away too, especially considering the kind of info she begins to share.

As I watched, I began to feel strongly that the screenplay was written by a man who very much wanted to be the tax lawyer, sitting uncomfortably in his office like J. Alfred Prufrock with an unexpected, hot visitor spilling her intimate secrets to him. It felt almost like a sexual fantasy stripped of it's bare eroticism and drawn into the "but what would I do if that *actually* happened" realm. Some of it was lamely predictable, but I have to admit I enjoyed. Which I guess just proves my original point: once again, I've watched a movie with a really hot woman in it and I probably only liked it because of the hot woman. I guess I could be a sucker for worse things...