Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

at SUNY Geneseo, I think about the late, beautiful actress Farrah Fawcett. When television and movies reference the 1970s, such as Boogie Nights or VH1’s I Love the 70s, they always include the infamous poster of Farrah Fawcett in her bathing suit during her stint on Charlie’s Angels. However, Farrah was only on that show for a year. Yet pop culture would be incomplete without any mention of Farrah Fawcett in the 1970s. I would spend only a year and a half at SUNY Geneseo, but that year and a half was a big part of my life.

Finding out who was going to be my roommate had me filled with anxiety. I didn’t know anybody going to SUNY Geneseo, so I was randomly assigned a roommate. My roommate, Bruce, was from a neighboring town in the Capital District. He arrived to the room first, and when my mother noticed that he brought coasters, her response was, “I like him already.” My dorm was known as Onondaga Hall, and I was living on the fourth floor.

The day my mother dropped me off was emotional for her. She was scared to let me go, especially knowing what had happened only a couple of months before. She reassured me that things would be fine. I was still diligently taking the Zyprexa, and I hadn’t heard any voices since June 20th. My mother was scared to drive a van or truck, so we managed to fit a refrigerator and all my clothes in a small Dodge Neon. As a result, I didn’t have a television, DVD player, or a computer my entire freshman year.

I had a more positive attitude toward college than I did high school. I didn’t want to be known as a loner; I wanted to have a fun college experience. I changed drastically, often walking into people’s rooms and introducing myself.

August 31, 2001, was the first Friday night I was officially in college. Most of the people who lived on my floor were planning to get wasted, but I didn’t really want to, so I decided to stay in the dorm. I didn’t just want to spend a Friday night masturbating alone, so I wandered a few doors down and found a pair of female roommates redecorating their room. Without being invited, I just went in and said hello. Amelia and Jody were the two roommates. Amelia told me that the she didn’t go out drinking with the rest of the students because she promised her boyfriend, who was going to college in Washington, D.C., that she would stay in. Jody didn’t want to go out, either. I joined Jody and Amelia and some of their friends in a viewing of Pretty Woman.

While I was watching the movie, I had an itch in my underwear—something that happens to men sometimes. I had to maneuver my hand to get to it, and it appeared to the girls that I was masturbating. One girl, Denise, ran out of the room because she was laughing so hard. I left quite an impression on those girls down the hall.

During the initial weeks of school, I would basically hang out with anybody. At the dining hall, I would sit with random people I didn’t know and then ask them what they were doing that evening. Another group I gravitated toward was Bruce and his friends. Within the first week of school, Bruce had found a girl he was interested in named Margaret, and he started hanging out with her friends. I got the feeling that I wasn’t welcome after a few weeks of spending time with them. One time when the group was playing Hangman, my statement that everyone had to guess was “My dog has pubic lice.” Another time when a girl jokingly called me gay, I responded with, “No, I have my own penis to play with.” I started to get annoyed with Bruce’s friends, too. They loved having dance parties in my room and would sing Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” while dancing on my bed.

A few weeks into the school year, I saw a sign for an informational meeting about working at the campus radio station. I was excited and eagerly attended the first meeting. My first day as a disc jockey was Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. Even though it was from two to four in the morning, I liked the pretty blonde girl who was training me and enjoyed listening to the music. When I was alone at the station, I would dance in my chair and roll the chair with myself in it all over the building.

After my first day as a disc jockey, I went to bed, got up at 9:30 a.m., showered, and went to breakfast in the cafeteria. Instead of showing music videos or college news, the television station was glued to the terrorist attack that had just occurred in New York City. I was listening to the news from afar, but I didn’t know the details of the event. Still unaware of what was happening, I went to music history class and took my quiz, then went to work at the admissions office where I finally heard about the terrorist attacks. Since I didn’t have a television in my dorm room, I asked some people on my floor if I could watch the unfolding saga with them. Later that night, a huge candlelight vigil was held at the campus center. My first instinct was to ask Bruce and his friends if I could go to the vigil with them, but Bruce told me they were leaving immediately and didn’t have time to wait for me to get off the phone with my mother. He came off as cold and heartless on a day when the whole world was crying. In fact, Bruce and his friends went to the vigil only because that’s where everybody else on campus was going.

Besides singing “Kumbaya” at the vigil, many students took the time to talk about how the terrorist