After being hit on at Barnes & Noble

I received a compliment(or something resembling one)between the aisles of Poetry and Fictionat Barnes & Noble,from a wannabe representative
of Smooth Talkers Anonymous:
Far too prettyto be reading books.
I wonder how many tragic young women,digging through Plath and Dickinsonin search of validation,would allow themselves to be flatteredby this drivel?How many would allow this blatant chauvinismto infiltrate their hard-won rooms of their own?I think of my teenage self,curve-less and wiry-haired,unpopular, yet proud to admit
that the love of my life is named Gilbert,
and you may not have heard of him
because he lives in a book. Therein was the real reason I was single
for so long, but nonetheless satisfied with who I was. I saw the world through fiction,allowing me to avoid the real-life villains with the hope that,if characters are created by humans,surely they can be embodied by
real humans, too."Too pretty" to be reading books,
you say?Too bad.You're too decently attractive
to be so pathetically ignorant.