 Ugh. Is it good? Is it cold? Oh. Oh. It's sparklingwater.com. Welcome back to Life Lessons and Film, and today we're going to be making sense of life through if Beale Street could talk. Yeah. Yeah. We got three lessons from it. Four four. Who's counting? I cried. We watched, we tried to watch it twice, right? Only managed to get through it the second time because I watched it, we watched it the first time, and one second in, I'm already falling apart because of that beautiful score. Wow. Yeah. The conflict between just that deep love that they share and that... All the forces working to tear it apart basically. Yeah. To tear it apart, yeah. Yeah. Whether it's... Anything good. The system, institutions, right? Yeah. The police or family. Yeah. They bring the family of the son's family over to announce to them that he's going to be a father. Yeah. And they weren't the happiest. The mom is very incredibly religious, but we can talk about that. We're... Yeah. Yeah. We're trying a new thing now where we're kind of brainstorming the lessons, you know. As we... Yeah. As we drink our water. We drink water. Over some water. A powerful one that I got. It's a great line from the movie. I think it's where she says she's talking to the daughter. The daughter is obviously nervous about being pregnant. Her partner is in jail and she's going to give birth in a few months. And the mother is trying to console her saying, you know, believe in love because love got you this far. See it all the way. Like, let that be your guiding light. It's kind of that finding meaning. If you... If you can find a why, then you can sustain anyhow or you can make it through anyhow, right? Which is what you need to get through something like that. Remember how you... what brought you two together, you know. Remember why you committed to this man, you know. And I think that's something that's really important. I think it's hard, you know, in life to do it with anything. Never mind just love. But especially with love just because of the world we live in. The world we live in has kind of tends to make love very superficial, you know. Yeah. Focuses more on the romantic aspects of it. And that's the thing that sustains it. I mean, try to package it. Yeah. Like a commodity, something you can buy. Yeah. Yeah. In many different ways. Yeah. Whether it's buy a certain product to help you find love, you know, or whatever. Whatever it is. There is this whole idea of love, right? That is sold to you and you go into love. You know, maybe you go into love honestly with credibility, with authenticity, right? In the way that you should with love. Because of the environment you're in, you start to question whether or not is this right? And are we meeting the standards, you know? Like are we following the yardstick that's been set out by society? And then you start to question yourself. So I think that was a great lesson to just remember to go always go back to the foundation of what it is that brought you two together. So that when you are questioning or even when maybe you're like in the middle of a rough patch because life is hard and it tests your relationship as well. Just always go back to the things that thing that brought you two together to just help you hold on and help you fight for that thing that was important. I think, you know, I think that's what it was for me. Absolutely. Yeah. It's to focus on, yeah, exactly. And then you can have that for anything. Love. Excuse me. I like this new thing with the sparkling water, but it does get me bilchy. But yeah, it could be that that's also just a good way to remember in terms of relationships with people, relationships with things, whether it's projects, work, like why did you do it in the beginning? You know, like remember clearly, if you did it for a passion in the beginning and for love of it, then remember that. Always remember why you started in the beginning. Yeah. Honestly. And when you're driven by your passion and your truth, you are so much more, you know, you're so much better. Yeah. You know, whatever it is you're doing. Yeah. That's fulfillment enough. Another one I was trying to think because related to when the mother and the sisters of the guy, they were very upset and they were disapproving of the, you know, the daughter's family. Of the daughter's family? Yeah. That's the fact that she got pregnant. Well, that too, I guess, but it seemed like they just didn't have much use for the family either. Yeah. So, you know, again, what is that? Is that envy for clearly a relationship that just seems so full of love and so great and so special? Is that envy or is that just a closed off mindset? Is that ego? What is that do you think? To be honest, this is what I feel. This is what I leaned from that particular interaction. Right? As a person who has this skin color, I'm showing them the burn. I got burnt. I cook. Okay. And I always burn myself. I cook. But so as a person with a particular skin tone, I related a lot to what was going on there. A lesson that I got. Like, so there was that interaction. They were. Not mine. Well, so there was this interaction between the families, right? Of Fani and the girl. Why can't we remember her name? She, Fani's, so she's pregnant and her family wants to tell Fani's family about this. So the mother is so completely upset and, you know, starts going on. Clementine. Fani's mom is insanely upset, very much vilifies the girl and her family. Yeah. So the girl is narrating and says, you know, Fani's mom doesn't think I'm good enough for Fani, but I think what it is is just she doesn't think I'm good enough for her. And so Fani's dad is so, they just don't have a good relationship. Fani's dad and mom, she's super religious and very much like. Very self-righteous. Yeah. The father is swearing in front of her and they're bickering at each other the whole time. There's an awkward conversation going on with both families. Yeah. For me, the lesson there was how living in a system that's oppressive and that tells you that that works very hard to beat you down, beat you down enough that you internalize it, which if you're a black person and you're really honest with yourself, there are a lot of inferiority complexes that you struggle with because the world tells you a lot of times. Like if you are not a person of European descent, you probably would understand having to struggle with inferiority complexes, no matter how confident you are and how successful you are. You deal with those things because you're someone who's underrepresented and you experience a lot of social, political and economical situations in life that people of European descent don't necessarily experience because largely the world accommodates them, you know, in a lot of ways. And so you do have the sense of inferiority. Sometimes you have, you know, as an underrepresented minority, you have the sense of needing to succumb to the rules and structures of this environment that is so oppressive or that isolates you but you live in it, right? And you're just like, I just want to live in it and survive. I don't want to feel like life sucks all the time. So how do I survive? Yeah. A lot of times then you are finding ways to adapt. And adapting means you're going against yourself, going against who you are, your identity, as a black person, as an Asian, as a non, you know, as a non-white person, you're going against all of these things because this environment that you live in tells you or makes you feel that all of these things that are you that are part of your identity are not good enough in so many ways, overt and subtle, right? So I think that's basically what it is. So like there's this kind of this deep self-hatred. And so whenever they interact with other minority minorities, they get upset when, let's say for example, if it's another black person, like they will get upset if I'm expressing my blackness, whatever that is, right? Like obviously that's also very varied. But like if I'm seeming to be black in the way that they think is maybe like black in the way that is looked down on, right? Because at the end of the day, what is being black, right? But depending on your specific type or your nature or inferiority complex, you will have certain ideas of the bad things about, you know, like that black people do, right? And you want to steer clear as much as possible from all those things. So if you want to see someone else acting that way, you get so, that hatred that you have comes up, right? And it's not just hatred for this person. It's hatred for yourself too, which of course also makes sense if you're coming from my system that's oppressive and that tells you that you're not good enough. So for me, the mom, Fani's mom, is that way Fani's trying to raise kids who are not going to look to seem black, you know, completely black because in her mind, that's going to make them move easier in this world. That's going to mean that they're not targeted as much by the police, you know? Her mind, that's them hoping they have a better future, that's looking out for them in her mind. Yeah. It's not something that's restricted to the black community, you know? Like I know a lot of people coming from Asian backgrounds who change their names, you know, they change it to a European name and they all of a sudden become John or Mary to move quicker, you know? And so that they can write it on their job application and it's Mary instead of a name that someone else can't pronounce and, you know? Right. But those things are so little. You don't even think that they're a huge deal, but they're such a huge deal at the end of the day because they kind of pile up. There's this book called The Body Keeps the Score, but I also want to say that subconscious keep the score, right? Because if you keep doing things like that, you're changing your name, right? That's going to be my next audible pick. Yeah. Yeah. So wait, I thought we were doing... We got the trough. That was yours. My next pick is going to be The Body Keeps the Score. Yeah. So you do these little things, you don't even notice, but they just keep hurting you. You wake up, you look at yourself in the mirror, you hate yourself. You don't even know why because you change your name from whatever to Mary or John. The lesson was just that how an oppressive system can really turn you against yourself. Yeah. Right? And isn't that the whole thing about depression can look like hatred or like anger towards yourself, right? So obviously it's easy to be depressed in a system that rejects you or doesn't take care of you or oppresses you or doesn't respect you. Yeah. It's easy to be depressed and then depression comes out in certain ways like that, like self-hatred or hatred towards other people that remind you of your own situation. Yeah. Yeah. It's also very sad. That also made me really sad, you know? Like when I... Beyond the lesson, right? It of course reminds me of... Because these things are still... These issues we still struggle with right now in a very... In less tangible or less transparent ways. But they're just these little things that they're... Sometimes you think that it's even worse, you know? Because it's like there's this real beautiful facade of complete progression in the world, right? But then there's this backdrop of, no, nothing's really happened, but then you can't... It turns the challenges that you do face into like this abstract existence. If I can't... I don't know how to explain it. But like it's kind of like back in the day, right? Or like in those... In the 50s, you get beaten up by the police or like you're in prison. Those are tangible things you can see, right? But now it's like, what are you going to hold on to? It's these things that you can't exactly explain, you know? Those kinds of transgressions are still there, but in less visible ways, right? So imagine coming from that. The only thing that you have control over is hating yourself and trying to adjust or to adapt to the system. Like that's really the only thing that you have. Especially because if you do do that, you do see that standing up for yourself actually makes it worse. It makes it harder than adapting. Do you know what I mean? Right, right. It's a lot of times it is just easier to adapt with or to go with the confines of the system you find yourself in. And to fight uphill against the current, against the grain all the time. Two solid lessons. Yeah. I feel like there's something else that I'm wearing. There's probably something else. Or is it because you don't, you know, you're going to edit like crazy. So I would say loss and having to accept loss. Yeah, and that could be, you know, it's a really, it's a heartbreaking part where, I was going to say when they do all that, where they steal to raise enough money to go to Puerto Rico to try and convince the person to be a witness or to help them with their case. And then it doesn't work, right? She freaks the person out and she, they lose the chance to get her to be on their side. Yeah. After all that, right? So accepting loss in the sense of, I guess, accepting that their son is going to have to grow up, not really being able to, you know, have a father around for most of it until when they visit. That's, I guess, accepting that. But yeah, I mean, definitely accepting loss. Accepting that they're there, that the two families, you can't just have a cohesive family that the families just won't get along. They won't ever approve. Accepting the loss of having like a cohesive two families coming into one. I'm going to go to the water. Well, after Tisha's mom, I'm talking here. I'm talking here, I'm talking here. They realize that they're not going to get funny out of jail. And obviously the cops have tried everything to make sure fabricated whatever you name it, to try to make sure that Fani stays and remains in jail. That's when they realize that, okay, we've tried everything. We just have to accept it and just let it go, right? And so she says something like, we as parents have to accept our pain or something like that. Can I make a note of it? Yeah, she says we have to accept what we have been given so that our children can be free. Right. Yeah. And so of course at that time, she's referring to her and Fani's reality. And she's been in pain about this. Both of them have been in pain about this and complete anguish understandably. But they realistically can't do anything about it anymore. And now it's just trying to figure out how do we, we have a new life here. We want to give this new life freedom because they don't have anything to do with what happened in the past. Yeah, like she said, she's like, you're having a grandchild. What differences make how it gets here? Yeah. You know, it's a new person to celebrate in your life. Yeah. I guess maybe the theme here, the lesson is the importance of acceptance, like of hard things, okay? Yeah. Because then you can focus on raising your kid and giving them the best that you can instead of focusing on being angry about the system. Yeah. It's not doing your kids any good. Yeah. It's not going to do anything to your kid or being sad even or being depressed. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, the kid is a kid and they need your love. They need you to be strong. And they need you to teach them how to survive the world. You know? Yeah. So I think that was, that was, the lesson there was just I guess the importance of acceptance and not just, not necessarily just loss and accepting it. Yeah. Accepting just your circumstances and then moving forward and making the best of it. Yeah. Accepting your circumstances and moving forward. That can also help you heal. So that it'll be better for raising kids, right? Yeah. You need to work on your, heal your own stuff too, your own pain or your own trauma or your own regrets or whatever so you don't dump that on your kids as well. Yeah. Just to help kind of move forward. Yeah. For everyone, yeah. I don't want to talk too much because he edits. It's great. It's great. So the movie was great. Yeah. And you can take that, the story and apply it to your own life and it doesn't have to be what to do with love or politics or society. It can apply to just things like loss of the opportunity to have a better relationship with someone that is no longer in your life. You know? Yeah. Or your need to accept something that's been really holding you, that's been weighing heavily on your heart. Completely beyond your control. Yeah. It's completely beyond your control. You have nothing to, you can't do anything about it, but it's very, it's weighing you down. It affects your life, but you got to let it go. You know? That kind of stuff. Yeah. Or you could identify with not feeling good enough. You know? And trying to change yourself to fit. Another mold. Another mold. Yeah. Because you thought you think that that's going to make your life easier than, you know, being proud of who you are, even learning how to be proud of who you are. Maybe you don't even know how to do that. Yeah. I was just crying. I journaled. I wrote a poem. And I was listening to the soundtrack. And I was just like... But yeah, that was some stuff we got, some lessons we got from my Feel Street Good Talk. Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to be doing the same thing again for another movie. Next time. On My Pleasant's Info. Yeah. Yeah. Toodles.