I Can Change This Later, Right? Take Two

I met David Foster Wallace once. It was when he was interviewing for the creative-writing position at Pomona. (Though, if we were going to be honest, there was really no interview—it was his position if he wanted it, simple as that.) Wallace gave an hour workshop on a few student pieces and while we were all supposed to contribute in an attempt to emulate a "real" creative-writing class, we mostly just sat in a narcotic state of awe. "David Foster Wallace. Was here. In our crappy second-floor classroom with this ridiculous round table and dated decor." At the end of the hour, he told us that if we were going to remember one thing, just one thing, from his workshop, it would be that we (as a society of grammatically impaired citizens) always used the word "nauseous" wrong. When we said "nauseous" we really meant "nauseated." And that was it. He thanked us and a few weeks later he was offered the full-time job at Pomona. I never had a chance to work with or learn from Wallace, as I graduated that spring and drifted off into postcollege malaise. However, Wallace's 20-second lesson on the use of "nauseous" never made it far from my tongue. Ever since that day, I have made myself into some forsaken grammar vigilante of appropriate "nauseous" use and I really don't know why I did. Maybe it was the fact that someone of Wallace's cerebral immensity felt that spreading the "nauseous" gospel was worth the final comment of a job interview and thus the least a literary disciple like myself could do was to continue to infect others with grammatical purity. Or maybe in those moments when I tell my friends that their hangover is not, in fact, making them "nauseous," I actually share some transient kinship with the most epic of authors.