Divebombing Until You're Breathless

Holy Blogging Blogger Batman! It's my 550th post!

Continuing on a post from last week in which I talked about trying to reconcile my personal views about women with what I write, I thought I would talk about another thorny dilemma that I currently face with a greater degree of frequency than the other examples I gave last week combined, and its something that you might encounter during your day-to-day activities, no matter what your gender preference may be.

For the most part, I work in an office full of very attractive professional women, and I say that with no malice of lust, but simply as a matter of record.

The problem that seems to crop up with a degree of frequency that the frat boy kind of guy would be in seventh heaven with, but yours truly finds to a certain degree, to be unsettling, is when I either happen to strike up a conversation or happen to ride in the elevator with a member of the opposite sex.

The writer in me would probably write about these encounters heavily flavored with sexual innuendos, crudeness or blatant sexual foreplay. In the real world, because these professional women are quite attractive and even though the attire that they wear is appropriate for an office setting, the fact that this attire more often than not accentuates what they got, usually puts me in a predicament of ginormous proportions.

Okay, I might be exaggerating just a tad, but I'm sure you're asking the screen, "How?"

Well, to use a crude example, there was a particular comment (please read #5) left in a post written by my good friend Riot Kitty, which basically was a thinly veiled insult about how guys would more often than not focus on the size of in front of them as opposed to the brains behind them.

To certain degree he is correct. Most guys do have a tendency to focus on the size and/or the valley that the size creates and not the brains behind them. And this is a problem that I do have a tendency to suffer from as well.

I try to focus on the brains behind the size when I have a conversation with a woman, although because of my lack of height (I'm 5' 5" without shoes), talking to a woman who is of my height is infrequent at best. I'm either looking up at them (somewhat bad) or looking down at them (very, very bad). The person that is, although for sake of argument, you can probably substitute "boobs" for "person" and it would pretty much mean the same thing.

Because of that, my conversations have a tendency to be somewhat clipped and disjointed. Bad I know, but the alternative could be infinitely worse. I'm sure my female readers could probably agree with me on that point.

Now as for riding in elevators, it becomes a slipperier slope. If I'm riding in a elevator by myself and a couple of women enter the elevator, I have a tendency to either stare at the floor, stare at the floor numbers counting down (or going up) or simply close my eyes. Same deal applies if I'm entering the elevator and there is at least one other attractive co-worker already there.

For what its worth, I do try to stave off any potential headaches by either offering a genuine compliment about their appearance or...well, I guess appearance does cover just about everything doesn't it?

But wait, there's more.

Sometimes I'll ask about a particular item of clothing that they're wearing and quickly add in that I write and I'm trying to make sure that I get accurate descriptions of clothing and accessories. Or sometimes, I'll ask about the visible tattoo that adorns a particular part of their anatomy.

It is a very fine line that I walk during my M-F existence, and so far I have survived these potential landmines with my gift of gab, a writer's eye for research and the small fact that I'm a genuinely nice person.

So my question to you out there is: do you suffer through something like this during your M-F work day? How do you diffuse a potentially awkward moment? And it doesn't matter if either gender answers because I really am curious about how women might handle these types of encounters.