Season 1, Episode 11 - Friday Night

Original Airdate - January 27th, 2002

Some random extra has a giant mason jar of weird goo in liquid that they show wordlessly to another random extra. Sean asks Emma out. Cue theme song.

Emma is getting a little exhausted by Toby’s crush. She doesn’t have time for his noziness. She’s too excited for her date. Well, is it a date? When Manny hears the story of how Sean asked Emma out, she isn’t so sure. Emma tries to clarify with Sean and he is really awkward, so she targets him in dodgeball, frustrated.

Paige overhears Manny and Emma chatting and offers her advice. Paige insists it’s a date. Boys are like that. Emma and Sean IM and clear up the misunderstanding. He picks her up. Christine tries to psych her up with her own terrible first date story but it just makes her more nervous. She makes it even worse by insisting the tweens take an awkward picture. 

Emma instantly gets pooped on by a bird. Luckily she’s close enough to change at home and Christine can take another picture. At dinner they start to bond because Emma’s a vegetarian and Sean doesn’t eat beef. He spent the summer at his aunt and uncle’s ranch. His graphic depiction of cattle slaughter is a little awkward. It’s a little more awkward when Emma gets ketchup on her chin. 

And it’s really awkward when Sean has to dig in the trash for Emma’s lost wallet. It’s nowhere to be found so they head for the dumpster. That’s when Emma realizes she’s had her wallet the whole time in another pocket. She’s so embarrassed she runs away.

The next Monday, JT, Manny, and Toby hear the date story and look at both awkward photos. Toby, of all people, insists that if Sean really likes her, this won’t bother him. Sure enough, Sean walks in and takes one of the Polaroids. It remains on!

Grade 8s. Kwan catches Spinner listening to music in class. She tries to take his Diskman and fumbles it. His fault for using it in class! Spinner gets detention. Jimmy takes his side, and, when Kwan admonishes Jimmy and Ashley for PDA, Ashley and Terri agree she’s too much. Spinner tells Jimmy it’s time to get Kwan back, but Jimmy doesn’t want to get himself into trouble. 

Kwan is late for class due to a meeting with Raditch, and Jimmy and Spinner entertain the class with a silly impression. But when Kwan shows up, she reveals she could hear them over the intercom. Jimmy get detention too, and is now ready to join Spinner’s revenge plot that night while Kwan teaches night school.

They sneak into the school and use the intercom to make weird noises, disturbing her class. Kwan goes to the office to try and catch them, but they are able to hide. Next, Spinner orders a bunch of pizza to her classroom. Her students end up paying for it and it further disrupts class.

Finally, they egg her car. When she comes out and sees it, she breaks down crying. Spinner loves it but Jimmy feels guilty. Come Monday, Kwan is absent. In fact, she’s taking a leave of absence for the whole term. Turns out, her husband is very sick, and the stress got to be too much. Wow! Good job boys!

I distinctly remember the moment that I understood that adults were people.

It was Christmas Eve 2010. A rare, glorious white Christmas in Alabama. It would snow once or twice a year, but it rarely stuck. Sometimes, we got an unpleasant and dirty slush that wasn’t exactly inviting. This year was different. This was splendid, perfect snow. The best snow we ever got.

I was a sophomore in college, and I was going places. Instead of returning to school in the spring, I was off to Orlando to have a big boy job putting on a fur suit and hugging children. But I wasn’t the only one making move. It was going to be our last Christmas in that house. My mother and brother were moving to Pennsylvania and more of the family would follow soon.

There was a tension around that holiday, but not a totally unpleasant one. No one knew what was next for our family, but it seemed like these changes were good. New jobs, new experiences, new frontiers. Alabama had been good or us and bad to us. It was time for what was next.

But some of the tension surrounded my grandparents and that was less good. They’d moved down South to be closer to our family, but now our family was scattering. Plus, my sister was a high school junior, and the plan was for her to finish up school while living with my grandparents. It was a big burden to take on at their age.

We’d all headed to church to hear my grandpa give his Christmas eve sermon, then back to our house to our traditional easy meal. The conversation at dinner centered around all of these changes, positivity and optimism laced with a reminder of the score. I did this for you. I did this for you in return. Whose turn is it now?

When the extended family left, my siblings headed to bed and my mom and I started chatting. The unusually perfect snow drifted outside and my mom shared how frustrated she was by the scorekeeping, how unsure she was about the move. And as she talked, she pulled out gifts.

My mother had always been very good at Christmas morning. Even when we didn’t have much of a spread, she always created that Santa Claus magic. We awoke to missing cookies, stuffed stockings, and a tableau of presents. I obviously no longer believed in Santa, promise. I knew my mom was responsible for these magical mornings. But this was the first year I’d seen her put it all together.

And it all just clicked. The snow, the talk, the Christmas. I saw my mother as human. This was a complicated person, not a grown up with everything together. The glass shattered. If my mother was a whole person, so were my friends’ parents, my teachers, the bus drivers, the people at the grocery store. Adulthood wasn’t simpler than adolescence, it was more complicated. It was more of the same.

I think it’s pretty normal that teenagers don’t understand that the adults in their lives are just as human as they are. If you acknowledge that, you have to acknowledge that the messy uncertainty never stops. Maybe your hormones regulate and your frontal lobe forms, but you still have to figure out how to person, day in and day out.

I’m old enough now that I know that this never changes. There is no age at which I will have it all together, and it is profoundly human to stumble your way through. But I still find myself looking at people older than me with the expectation that they’re going to make me feel better and show me a finish line. And I still find myself startled when I realize they won’t.

My mother is getting married today. I don’t know that I expected that a few years ago when she got divorced, and I didn’t expect the divorce a few years before that. She keeps showing me the ground can and will move. I do kind of miss being a kid when I didn’t notice.