Weepy weekend, whoa

This was a wildly weepy weekend. On Friday night, I drove to see my boyfriend. We went out for sushi and watched part of Planet Earth. Which for some reason sent me into a tailspin of weeping that I'll have to try to explain later.

The next morning, we headed to a museum that I could not have loved more. I kicked myself for not bringing my camera. We ate lunch, sharing crab claws marinated in amber beer and rosemary butter and a Thai chicken salad. I had a strawberry lager, which was scrumptious.

Later, we shared a pizza at Angeli and went to see Waitress. I started sniffling when Keri sang the pie song and cried and cried by the end. I must have had something hormonal going on, because that made two nights in a row. Certainly this called for gelato. He got white chocolate almond, and I had strawberry and vanilla.

The next morning, we crossed the lake to take care of some house business. We had our first coffee since Katrina at his favorite coffee shop, which just reopened a few weeks ago.

I became and remain obsessed with a five-note section of the Planet Earth theme. You can hear it here ... it's the first 5 notes of this interlude, lasting until about 8 seconds in. I played it on the piano as G E F G C. I know those five notes in sequence for some reason. Part of a movie theme? Another song from another life? It's been driving me totally insane. (That link goes to Windows Media Player, so apologies if you don't have it.)

Last night, my mom cooked crawfish etouffee, shrimp and corn soup, butternut squash with pecans and breadcrumbs, and ice cream dessert for Father's Day.

I found the actual recipe in an old church cookbook from 1980. I'll post it here at the request of sixmilechick, who asked for it months ago. Eat and love.

So as for my breakdown on Friday night. Which was some sort of strange existential crisis, brought on, I think by watching too many World War II documentaries, most recently American Experience: Battle of the Bulge. I told Jessie that I keep watching them because I'm trying to understand why and how that war happened. And she said, "I actually know exactly what you mean about having to watch 800 movies ... because something is too large to make sense of without a lot of different stories." And that is exactly it. And I told Jessie some of this in an e-mail and now I will say it here.

So the Battle of the Bulge really brought on the weeping. And after watching a tiny bit of Planet Earth, I started and could not stop. And he said, "What is wrong?" And I said, "I have a heavy heart." And he said, "Because of the Battle of the Bulge?" And I said, "Yes." And then I hiccupped a lot and said, "And the animals. All the beautiful animals. They're just trying to survive. And we're fucking the world up. And we didn't learn anything from WWII." And I thought about soldiers with their feet frozen off and the little dead Belgian children frozen in the snow that the documentary showed. "And if we didn't learn from that war? What war will we learn from? We are at war RIGHT NOW." And we're killing the planet, and what is the point, and nobody lives for very long in the end, etc. etc. And I wept and wept. And nicely, he let me and patted me.

Anyway. All I'm saying is that World War II documentaries and Planet Earth are kind of a serious one-two punch in the soul, at least for me. I've hardly seen any of Planet Earth so far, but it's killing me. Especially the snow leopards and bottlenose dolphins and elephants who swim like they're as light as feathers or air.