Useless

A momentary departure from Jordan (Ma'in Hot Springs photos still due) with a short nonsense entry. Last night I was at dinner with a Siberian-born Australian who has lived and worked in India, Italy and now the Arab Gulf and is married to a Palestinian. She made a delightful dinner and I brought some obscure foreign film dvds as the entertainment. We had to call the husband, who I thought was in Basra working but was actually in Jordan to ask him how to turn on the dvd player. The conversation I heard from my end on the couch was hilarity incarnate. My blonde Russian girlfriend imploring her husband with terms of endearment in Italian laced with expressions of frustration in heavily accented English with definitive articles missing. I was laughing and told her to forget about it and we watched something else on her Mac.

This incident recalled a previous ridiculous international phone expense. I found myself at the Serge Lutens shop in the Palais Royal and I was intent on purchasing the perfume a consultant from Hong Kong brought with her that I found divine. Note: I cannot for the life of me purchase eye shadow or perfume without supervision....for all my vast talents in matters of taste and aesthetics, I am useless in this realm and throw away good money on ill-fated purchases. I knew the bottle had a grey label and the contents was almost a red wine color. The Parisian saleswoman was not impressed in the least by my confusion when she placed two such bottles in front of me and I could barely tell the difference. I called our consultant, who was trying to recover from severe food poisoning in India before joining us in Paris, from my roaming Gulf mobile on her Hong Kong mobile 4 km away to ask her to go into the bathroom and read the label on her perfume. The sneer of contempt on the Parisian's face took an exponential hike, especially when I asked her to fill out the paperwork for the VAT reimbursement. That's the perfume above: "Fille en aiguilles," also sold at Barneys in New York. Sublime.

I was diagnosed with frozen shoulder (WTF, right?) two weeks ago and I am getting a cortisone injection tomorrow, just before I travel abroad for business at the end of the week. At least I'll smell good.