What do I look like?

A nice person? I mean, I must. Round, trusting face, blonde hair. Innocent, wholesome... Nice midwestern girl, n'est pas? To that end, people are always stopping me on the street, asking for directions, good places to go for breakfast, etc etc etc. Just the other day, someone asked me how to get to Kresge Hall - being in Evanston, there are a lot of students around, and I can only assume this Kresge Hall was connected in someway to Northwestern. I had no idea. I just work here, okay? So I look like a nice, trusting person who goes to Northwestern.

Yes, people on the street like to talk to me. There is a homeless guy who stands outside my Starbucks and talks to the passersby. He never directly asks for anything, that I have noticed, but he says things like 'God bless you' and 'You've got a great smile, ma'am' or 'Have a nice day, ma'am', or, my personal favorite, 'Great pedicure, ma'am!' Some guys usually hang outside the CVS across the street from the Starbucks, rattling coins in a cup.... So I was not surprised this morning, as I approached the CVS before work, on a run for some miscellaneous things, to see one of the abovementioned guys sitting there. I started to go into the store, when another guy approached and said, "I like your skirt, it reminds me of a scarf." I was wearing this really pretty skirt, patterned with pinks and blacks.... I always get compliments on it - and this was not the first time someone on the street had stopped me to comment on it. I said thank you and commenced into the store.

I was dithering around in the cosmetics section of the store and looked up to see the guy from outside had followed me into the store. He asked me if I liked poetry - he was selling some poems he had written to raise money to buy medication (so he claimed). He told me he was a homeless vet. He had been wounded in Vietnam. Do you know how I know that? He showed me his Agent Orange scar! Now keep in mind, I had not had my coffee yet, and I was like, "What the hell is this??" In the end I told him how sorry I was and went on my way. Not to seem heartless or anything - I care about the treatment of veterans in our country, especially since there are guys younger than me coming home from Iraq all messed up. We need to take care of these guys! But the place to pull on the heartstrings (and the purse strings) was not in the middle of the CVS after having followed me in there. Honestly.

I thought for sure that would forshadow the rest of the kind of day I would have, but I went through work with nothing extraordinarily weird happened other than that....

And here is my question - if I look like such a nice person, why don't nice guys come and talk to me?? Noooooo! The only guys who talk to me are the homeless guys, and, in the case of my undergraduate days, priests - okay, seminary students, but same difference. Will somebody please explain this to me???