I Am Isabel Dalhousie.

People have been inquiring if I'm still alive. Depends on if you mean physically or intellectually. My brain feels like it's stuffed full of marshmallows so I've been trying to avoid that old saying about keeping your mouth shut and letting people wonder if you're stupid or opening your mouth and removing all doubt. (See how I couldn't even form that thought without making it all rambling and weird? Yeah. Welcome to my universe right now.)

I have a cold. My kids have had colds. I've been stressed. All in all, things have been weird. I haven't wanted to write. I haven't even wanted to READ. If that's not a sign of some serious mental defect, I don't know what is.

I was saved from this humiliating disgrace (after starting, but not finishing about seven books) by the third installment of the Isabel Dalhousie series (by Alexander McCall Smith) finally being held for me at the library. I loved the first two: The Sunday Philosophy Club and Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. They are written at a trudgingly slow pace plot-wise but are packed full of humorous philosophizing and moralizing.

Imagine how surprised I felt when I checked out the customer reviews for these books. A lot of people HATED them. People repeatedly stated: "I expected these to be great like the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency but the characters were completely unlovable and the plot was ridiculous!"

I felt somewhat slapped in the face by the first statement there--the characters were completely unlovable???--mostly because I had decided that the main character, Isabel Dalhousie, is practically me on paper. Okay, I'm not rich like her or beautiful like her, but I can relate to her internal dialogues and arguments. So if Isabel is unlovable and pathetic... and I have decided I'm just like her... gosh, I don't always like putting two and two together.

Back to Isabel. She's a 42-year-old editor of the "Review of Applied Ethics" and freelance intellectual. The reason the book is so slow moving is that the reader is privy to the constant and thorough analysis of Isabel's circumstances. Here are a few examples from the pages I just read:

"Angie would not dress down; she would war a cocktail dress and there would be jewellery. She looked at her wardrobe, and felt, for a brief moment, despair. There were word people--idea people--and then there were clothes people--fashion people. She knew which group she belonged to."

"Was electronic memory a place? Before they appeared on the screen weren't they just endless lines of noughts and ones, or odd decimals? That, she thought, was the ultimate triumph of reductionism: Shakespeare's sonnets could be reduced to rows of noughts ... And what about ourselves, and our own reduction? We could each be rendered, could we not, down to a little puddle of water and a tiny heap of minerals. And that was all we were. Imperial Caesar, dead, and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. Or, as binary code might so prosaically put it: 010010010110110101110000 ..."

With internal monologuing like this, one day in the life of Isabel Dalhousie could take 900 pages. (But it doesn't!) If you were to look into my brain for the two minutes it took me to drop my oldest son off at school today, it might resemble Isabel in some small way:

As I pulled to a stop and put the car into park, I turned to my right and saw another car waiting. I recognized both the car and the driver, Amy. Amy looked over and, recognizing me, waved at me. I smiled, waved back at her and urged my son to expedite his exit from the car. As Amy was engaged in the same activity with her son, we were both splitting our attention between our children and the world outside the car.

Situations like this, innocent though they may seem to a confident person, rattled me somewhat. I always felt that I would somehow show either too much or too little amiability. Waving my arms and grinning would seem a bit too enthusiastic for greeting a neighbor, but was one wave enough? Should I wave at her each time she looked my way? Should I wave the first time and then smile each time we made eye contact afterward? Facial expressions are so difficult to understand when seen at a distance and through two sets of automobile glass. Perhaps if I merely smiled, she would not see it and think I was staring at her rudely without acknowledging the bond between us. So perhaps something more would be required by common courtesy or rules of etiquette.

As my son finally exited the car, I chose the coward's way out of the social encounter. I turned my head and stared off into the space on my other side. It's perfectly acceptable to glance about the parking lot, isn't it? As I began turning my head, I saw in my peripheral vision that Amy had turned back toward me and was waving goodbye. A second wave! I knew I should wave twice! But it was too late. I had already turned away and could hardly whip my head around now and admit that I had seen her. She would have already driven away, assuming that I was focused elsewhere.

I felt ashamed. My actions were not an actual rejection of the friendship between us--merely awkwardness that I always feel like I wave too often when at an audibly inaccessible distance. As I pulled away from the curb and eventually behind Amy's own car, I recognized in my peripheral vision another car driving past me. The glare on their window made it impossible for me to see the face, but as I drove a few feet further the view cleared and I saw another neighbor. He, too, was waving at me and apparently was in the final moments of the wave because his hand was starting to move back down to his side. His face had already started to turn away from me.

Gack! Another neighbor whom I had inadvertently snubbed. He had seen me staring at his car and frowning (in concentration) but no friendly gesture of greeting. He will never know that I simply couldn't see due to the sun's immediate angle to his windshield, unless I tell him, which would seem altogether too ridiculous for such a small moment. He will simply think, "Ahh yes, there's Juliana. I waved at her and she just frowned at me. Not too friendly, that one."