i love you.

so, again, mcsweeneys.net this week is putting up recollections about david foster wallace. i've been reading one or two at a time, as a) any more than that and my whole body starts to grieve, and returning from your smoke break and sploshing into your chair like a bucket of grief (4 or 5 times each day) is unhelpful and smelly, and b) every single one is so beautiful. here's a clip of the one by sue dickman -

...He was tough in workshop but not mean. He made me look at writers I'd already discovered on my own—like Lorrie Moore—in a new way, and he introduced me to writers I probably never would have discovered on my own, like Lee K. Abbott. He had us read a Stephen King story about a possessed laundry machine ("The Mangler") in conjunction with a prize-winning short story told from the point of view of a dead body ("Poor Boy") to illustrate the differences between literary and genre fiction. There were other tangible things. I used to confuse "further" and "farther," and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I'd confused them yet again, and in the margins, he'd written, simply, "I hate you." I've never confused them since. He once left me a note, postponing a meeting, excusing himself by saying, "I'm so hungry I'm going to fall over." While I was irritated that he wasn't there, I immediately adopted that sentence and have been saying it ever since.