"I've never been so embarrassed in my entire life."

My best friend from college had just finished telling me the story about how she, exhausted from mothering a kindergartener and newborn while studying for the bar exam, had been too tired to leave her booth at McDonald's. While her children entertained each other, she rested her head on her extended arm, which clutched a now-empty McDonald's paper cup. A kind patron walked by and shoved a few dollars into it.

"She thought I was homeless!" my friend said with a laugh. And it was pretty funny, especially for those of us who know how beautiful my friend usually looks and the affluence she comes from.

"Don't worry," I told her. "We've all looked homeless from time to time."

I rattled off a list of examples. Courtney Love has made a career off looking homeless. Perhaps my friend could drop her whole lawyer angle and go that route. I reminded her that many famous actors and actresses got their start while homeless in Hollywood. Even I myself, as a teenage backpacker, had looked homeless, spending nights sleeping on park benches, in train stations, on beaches and sometimes just on the sidewalk. I'll never forget the look of disgust on the patrons' faces at an expensive hotel in Alice Springs, Australia, when I sneaked into their pool area to use the showers after a two-week camping trip. To say the water ran dark reddish-brown off my body for 10 full minutes is an understatement. Probably because I took my sweet time. It was hilarious to watch the finely manicured feet in the other stalls jumping away as my mud bath swirled past them en route to the shared drains. (Hmm, I may have just exposed my sinister side.)

My friend and I giggled and moved on to the next conversation, but something about that talk stuck with me — because the truth was that for as silly as the conversation had been, it really wasn't funny. First of all, homelessness doesn't really have a "look." It comes in all ages, sizes and appearances. And second, my friend is not homeless. Neither have I ever been, nor has Courtney Love. And of all those many actors who claim homelessness, I'm guessing 99.9 percent of them are confusing the term "homeless" with couch surfing. Let's be clear: Crashing at your friend's apartment because you can't yet afford rent for your own pad isn't called homeless; it's called your early 20s.

It's so easy to generalize things. We do it all the time, and to be honest, it works as a good teaching tool for young children. I tell my son to stay away from all windowless white vans, from all dogs until he asks the owner whether it's OK to pet the pup and from all Sno Balls because — sorry, hot-pink coconut lovers — those things are just nasty. But what happens when we do the same with groups of people instead of seeing them as individuals with individual stories?

A few weeks ago, my car broke down. Nothing exposes the jerks of humanity like being broken down on a busy street during morning rush hour. For an hour, people cursed at me and honked their horns, as if all my car needed was a little J.K. Simmons-type motivation to get up and running again. Oh, well, now that you're honking and cursing, let me dig deep down inside and see whether I can self-mend this broken belt, this broken alternator and this dead battery. Suddenly, my car turns itself back on; the crowd goes wild, and people rush the street, lifting my car onto their shoulders as they do at the end of "Rudy."

Yeah, right.

Three heroes saved me from the mid-traffic turmoil. One man stopped to give me a jump, which didn't take. Another man stopped to help the first man push my car off to the side of the road. And a homeless man walked out into the street to stop traffic in both directions so my car could make it safely across. These three men took the time to help a stranger in need.

I met a lot of awful, screaming, scary people that day. Of all the people I would have felt totally embarrassed to look like, the homeless man was absolutely not one of them.

Like Katiedid Langrock on Facebook, at http://www.facebook.com/katiedidhumor. Check out her column at http://didionsbible.com. To find out more about Katiedid Langrock and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.