Back to the Basics

I've come to realize that I'm one of those people who love the basics. When I read, I often pick up the classics: basic. When I go shopping, I pick clothes with bold colors and classic styles: basic. When I think of a great day, I think of a day without a schedule, involving such things as sleep, good coffee, good books, good company: basic. In fact, in most things, from daily activities to theology, I'm a big fan of Occam's razor.

It's somewhat of an ironic fact about me, really: I love details, I love finding tiny errors and correcting them--I want to be an editor, after all; yet, at the same time, what I long for is simplicity.

Which means today was lovely. After an early wake-up call and trip to the airport to say goodbye to Kaitlin, who had an unfortunately long trip home ahead of her (it's midnight here and we left for the airport at 6am, but she still has another 6 hours to go, by my count), I slumped home on the MRT and went back to sleep for a few hours. When I awoke, I was met with the happy news that Rachel had waited for me to go to Costco, and at Costco I found some good ol' fashioned American basics like cheese, wheat bread, and chips and salsa. To round out my trip, I couldn't resist going for one of Costco's signature hot dogs. Pork instead of beef here, but still SO good.

I then got home and discovered that my rotisserie chicken had gone back a little too basic, in my own humble opinion:

It had a head still. True reaction.

I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for my first tutoring session tonight, with a young man named Hal whose father is a homeroom teacher at Hanmin. And, by preparing, I mean writing out a general outline of things we should do, and then re-reading the first chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and writing a bunch of reading comprehension questions on the content. Nothing more basic than one of my favorite books of all time!

Except perhaps the tutoring itself. I arrived at the cafe early and grabbed a cup of delicious coffee, and when Hal got there, we got down to work--on his writing and almost solely his writing. It was so much fun! I spent three years in college as a writing tutor, doing what I could for students' full length papers in little half hour segments; working on others' papers is a matter of course for me. But half hour sessions are not nearly enough to fully address all the issues in a paper, as I learned today, as Hal and I took a full hour and a half to pore over his two paragraph practice test essay.

It was glorious: all the skills I've honed over the past few years, but expanded out into a fuller time frame that allowed us to take a piece of writing from draft stage through a full work-up of structure and grammar (subjunctive mood played a key role in today's lesson) to rewrites of specific sentences to re-copying the whole thing in corrected form, allowing Hal to walk away with an example for future works. I loved it: back to the basics of English tutoring, and tutoring itself.

At home, an HBO series of Matt Damon movies (I caught the very strange and confusing second half of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and then the entirety of the also confusing and certainly not basic but, for me, intriguing The Adjustment Bureau, which led to an abortive convoluted theological conversation with Analicia which did, in fact, help to inspire this post) served as a nice break from some of the ridiculousness they've been showing lately, and after it finished I had the treat of listening to a podcast by the great Judah Smith, who always challenges me with his fantastic ability to bring everything back to the utmost basic of Christian faith: Jesus.

I love complex thought; I love teasing out inconsistencies and exploring convoluted new notions. I love experiencing new things. But that's just it: even when I'm delving into extraordinarily complicated notions, I do it with the intent of smoothing out the wrinkles and revealing the bigger picture, clean and pressed through the action of delving. I see complications as a juicy challenge on the way to clarity.

Because, to me, as much fun as labyrinthine experiences are, all those in the maze really have the same goal: to get out of the twists and turns--to get back to the basics.