My mentality is such that I would see choosing one of the orange pencils as "safer." Safer not to stand out too much. My instincts are to stand out and be noticed but from a close up distance, not from across the street or the room.
I definitely make conscious choices about how I might best blend in, in order to be taken for granted enough so that I can do what I want and be who I want.
Many periods of my life I have been alone on the street or attending some venue. Whenever I have companions or am able to travel by car, I am going to wear exactly what I want and ignore fitting in. In my neighborhood, you don't see people and especially women walking the streets to get anywhere, though occasionally out for exercise. The people who are out in the street alone, look like they're looking for trouble or have already found it. Women tend not to wear skirts here. I do wear them but am cautious about it. Other women who are wearing skirts are going to work and are only glimpsed entering their car in their driveway or in front of their rowhouse.
But more generally, I used to live on the other side of the river in the neighboring state and when I went into Philadelphia regularly, decades ago then, would often notice that I was the only woman alone - who wasn't clearly mentally ill - and not with a male or female companion, whether shopping or attending any venue. I once attended an academic conference with my then boyfriend and spent a lot of time on my own exploring Baltimore. When I was in the hotel lobby, having been introduced to a professor from Italy, he quietly remarked to me, "Always alone."
When I came to Philadelphia to go to college, I used to go into the center of town regularly to shop and go to movies. I used to attend many campus events. I was pointedly told that other women would not go anywhere alone. Women did not want anyone to think they hadn't a date for the event or were friendless. When I grew up in Southern California, we lived out in the sticks. I went to the larger city every weekend by myself as a teenager. I couldn't get any other girl to go with me because it involved riding the bus that traveled Route 66. My parents had lived back East and were familiar with public transportation but other girls' parents were very suspicious of it and worried that their daughters would be bothered or endangered by the other passengers. I think, though, that whether for weekend excursions or for school life, I dressed like an oddball - even though I had close friends, many acquaintances and a boyfriend - because my influences were mostly the old movies I watched on tv or the magazines I read. I longed to be grown up because I only saw the side of it where I imagined that people would stop interfering with me for my own good and I could do what I wanted to. So I dressed like the grown up I wanted to be. If I went to a larger social event for teens where I didn't know anybody, I would be pretty much shunned by the boys and I think it was because my manner of dressing - overformally, too grown up - was intimidating and I wasn't a "regular" girl. I didn't look friendly.
In high school, those of us who rode the bus were deposited at school quite early. Some of us would find our friends and there were tiny groups of girls who would walk the campus together before classes. My friend, from a Southern family, would say Hi to everyone we encountered. I asked why she said Hi to all those people she didn't know. She countered, Why not? So I learned a lesson from her and started then to speak to strangers. In college, girls in my dorm demanded to know how I got all those boys to walk me home from classes. I said I talked to them in class when they were sitting next to me. They were shocked that I would talk to someone I hadn't been introduced to. In later life, I was introduced at a community meeting as "the friendliest person in town who can get anybody to talk to her." At an icebreaker exercise within the school district where I was a community activist, we were to be interviewed briefly by the person next to us and then we would stand up and introduce that person, emphasizing perhaps little known facts. When the fellow introduced me and said, "She says she's shy," the room burst out laughing and some people actually slapped their knees. But there's a difference in how I dress and how I behave. I don't dress to encourage people to approach me - I don't aim to look friendly - but I am proactively "friendly" and chat them up first as a way of disarming them. I am what I recently read in an article : an extremely prepared introvert.
