Eric Rothman
@ericmsandwich
Filmmaker, editor, animator, stationary bicycle rider, sandwich enthusiast. My work has won very few awards. I currently reside in Dayton, Ohio.
Eric Rothman
@ericmsandwich
Filmmaker, editor, animator, stationary bicycle rider, sandwich enthusiast. My work has won very few awards. I currently reside in Dayton, Ohio.
This has gotta be one of the best songs ever. Just a tragic yearning for opportunity and a better life, and kindof knowing deep down that running away isn’t going to be the answer, but doing it anyway because it’s a source of hope. I love so much toward the end of the song, we are tragically seeing into the future at how things do, in fact, fall apart, but then landing back in this moment of decision to go–now or never, this or nothing. And then there’s something deeply American about it all too: the promise of self-reliance as the spoils of hard work, and the romance of hitting the road and the freedom of that.
I think about homelessness often but I feel like Andrew helped me make sense of it in a completely new way. Incredible access that humanizes. He brings you along on a journey of meeting these people and figuring out how to help and just when it feels like you’re on the right path, everything turns upside down and you're forced to reckon with a much more complicated reality.
This is so valuable. As someone who grew up in a semi-vacuum of healthy conflict modeling, my adult life has been trial and error in this area, and so it’s just wildly helpful to see other people working on their relationships. I find myself measuring my own progress against the couples in the show in a way that’s clarifying. For example, this one woman is so clearly trapped inside of her own story that she can’t even see how she’s in her own way about it—and I think I was that way once, and seeing it, I can see that I’ve moved past that, and that articulation is useful in understanding myself. And then this other guy extends such thought and care to his partner that it stuns you that people can be that good and caring and that gives you something to aspire to. It also helps you appreciate that there are so many different kinds of people, with different and completely valid life experiences. The slow depth of the show helps you move past whatever initial biases you might bring such that you can genuinely appreciate people that are different from you. It’s also heartwarming to see progress, and heartbreaking to see things fall apart. Such drama. You really grow to love, empathize, be frustrated by these people over the course of a season.
Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I... See more