12/25/98:
 It's been 18 months since the publication of "Trainaspotting," and I suppose some explanation is in order as to why I've decided to do an annotation.

 There is, predictably, no simple answer. When it was published, there seemed to be a positive response from the student body, even though "Trapped" is funnier and "Friday" and "Spinoza" more accessible to lives of normal students. Professors were polarized: some (friendly, tenured, nothing-to-lose types) requested autographed copies; others (everybody else neither friendly nor tenured) began giving me suspicious looks and avoiding prolonged exposure to me.

 The book was written in 5 or 6 days during the Spring Break of March 1997. The circumstances were harrowing. All the other books were out, in no small part because of my hounding of the authors. Now it was their turn to say, "Where's yourbook, hotshot?" We had an impatient printer waiting to hear that the book was ready; we had to give them updates on our progress every two days, and they would eventually take us to the cleaners for their digital printing services, perhaps out of revenge. I locked myself in Studio B in Estabrook and wrote 7-10 hours a day until it was finished. A colleague sat at the other computer and designed a video game about his penis getting him coffee. Rarely do the ridiculous and sublime stand so cleanly contrasted (I will leave it to you to decide which is which).

 So why the annotated version? Some reasons:

• The book is essentially didactic; I was trying to show students how the Administration works, and Administrators what life as a student is like. I took advantage of all sorts of Clark happenings from 1996-7 to do this. Annotating keeps this quickly-forgotten context alive. (Lord knows it helps the works of Swift, Carroll, and Fielding.)
  
  
• A lot of the book's detail sounds absurd, but most of that detail is based on true-life occurrences. In particular, dialogue placed in Administrators' mouths tends to sound vicious and unfair until you realize how much of it is real statements transcribed verbatim. Annotating gives people a chance to learn the true stories behind them.
  
  
• Because Clark is the decentralized hell-hole it is, most people miss the majority of the references. Annotating gives everyone a chance to get everything. Obviously, the danger here is "explaining the jokes," but that's okay with me. And hey, there's the odd chance it'll make it funnier.
  
  
• I currently have time and don't know when I will again. And it might be fun to rehash my thinking on certain things. Lord knows, I should do this before senility sets in.

 Finally, people always ask where the idea came from. It didn't come in a flash of light or after prolonged brainstorming: amazingly, once we had the CYOCA concept, it was an instant no-brainer. Here's how it happened:

 In Fall of 1996, CUFS showed "Trainspotting." This was a big deal, because it was new, popular, but most of all, paid for with money that was notallocated for it, causing a minor scandal within CUFS. The cause of the scandal was Greg Oken, and soon there was a broad consensus that Oken (physically) resembled Renton [Ewan McGregor] to an alarming degree. Hanging out with Oken and other members of CUFS, the observation was made that several people in CUFS filled out the rest of the cast eerily well. At some point, a joke was raised about making a movie parody called "Trainaspotting" using Clark students; whose idea it was is lost in time-- the movie part sounds like me but the title could have come from anyone. I remember being frustrated because it seemed like such a ripe idea, filled with possibility, and yet impossible to do in practice (at Clark, anyway).

(The book's cover photo is made up of the original people in our Clark-students cast; originally, we couldn't decide on a Begbie, but that problem solved itself when the idea became a book, and we stuck Jack Foley's mustache on President Traina to increase the resemblance. The cover might be my favorite part of it all.)

 Towards the end of the same semester, Ilsa Gordon suggested doing Choose-Your-0wn-Adventure stories in WheatBread, using Clark as the setting. (I still have her original email.) Two things came to mind instantly: we should publish them as books, and one of them should be called "Trainaspotting." I immediately thought of writing about a day in the life of President Traina. I knew this was my best shot at slicing Clark open like a cadaver and playing with the guts.

 OK, OK, enough of my yapping...

On with the story!