Breakdown

Below is a rough map of Moscow with the most important points of interest marked. Actually, these are the only four places we really know in Moscow, which by default make them the most important.

If you want to follow along on our travels, you can download a simple Moscow map program that allows you to search the streets in Moscow. Also, if you plan to come visit us while we're there, this would be a handy utility to have. Here's the download for the link: http://www.mom.ru/Engl/Download.htm You'll have to run the program once you download it, but it doesn't install anything, so you can just delete it when needed. As we know more about Moscow, we'll add other points of interest to our map. I'm holding out for an "Ono's Hawaiian Barbecue", but Kinzie tells me not to get my hopes up. There is a "Sbarro's" in the airport we're flying into, though.

I spent all day Friday going over notes on T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf for my next few weeks of class. At the end of the day, walking home from the campus library, I was thinking about what I could use from that information to create a good post for this site. Something really deep and thought provoking. But for some reason my thoughts kept being interrupted by the refrain of Jack Johnson's "Breakdown," the lines of which recurred in my head incessantly throughout the day. "I need this old train to breakdown." (full lyrics here: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jackjohnson/breakdown.html) The song describes a scene as viewed from a moving train, carrying the speaker past all the people that he'll "never get to meet" towards a place where he "don't need to be". I don't know how you feel about Jack Johnson, but you have to admit that central metaphor of this song is well-chosen. The machinery that propels life forward for many of us too often makes other people, other lives, merely part of the scenery, glimpsed for a moment and then lost in the rush to move on. I guess that these past few years we have experienced this momentum acutely, with pressures to establish the right path and lay the right tracks towards a future destination where we'll finally rest and be comfortable. In the process, we haven't always been able to "just roll through town" and leave the vehicle of progress behind for awhile (although Makinzie is much better at this than I am). Sadly, the more we get accustomed to the motion of the social engine the less likely we are to jump off and try out our own feet.

I don't intend to be brooding here; this isn't a melancholy observation but an enabling one. I think that God has chosen to put Russia into our lives right now with the intention of "breaking down" our dependence on habit, custom, and comfort. I think we really do need this "old train" to break down, even though I'm not sure where that will leave us. Ironically, in Moscow we'll be riding more trains than ever, and moving past a great many people that we'll never meet. We'll also be fueling the social machine by filling out job search letters for the MLA conference in December. But I'm also looking forward to slowing down the machine as much as possible, so that we can involve ourselves in the lives of people around us and maybe even "stroll through town" on occasion. I think that new paths will open up that we didn't even see before. And of course, the train will always be there when we come back.