Season 3, Episode 6 - Gangsta Gangsta

Original Airdate - October 22nd, 2003

Oh Sean, my sweet Sean. We left Sean is a good place with Emma last season, but it’s time for him to blow his life up, yet again. The issue is his girlfriend’s step-dad has cancer. This is not a good reason, but I think Emma is Sean’s only source of attention for being good. When he loses that…

Sean’s stuck at home, trying to call Emma and getting her voicemail. Tracker comes in with a girl, and sexiles Sean. Poor guy has nowhere to go. The next day at school, Sean is chilling with JT and Toby on the steps when homophobic bad boy Jay rolls up. Riding shotgun is his girlfriend, Alex. Alex is barely a character at this point, but oh how she will grow. Jay picks on Toby and Sean defends him.

In Media Immersion Class, it becomes clear that Sean’s grades are slipping. He wants to blame Simpson’s lousy mood, but Emma makes him feel guilty by saying that Simpson just started chemo. At least Christine bought him a new laptop to help raise his spirits. Sean changes the subject by asking Emma to hang out. It’s been forever, and they need the time. She isn’t sure she can, but he convinces her to set a date.

Sean is at his locker when he hears a crash. He turns over to see Jay, Alex, and the third member of their crew, a Black man who gets no name and may never appear again, smashing into a vending machine. Jay smirks at him and gives him a candy bar. Sean’s mood is turning around when Simpson tells Emma that he’s feeling too sick from the chemo and needs her to babysit Jack that evening. So much for the date.

In shop class, Sean helps a struggling Craig. It’s clear that Sean really shines when working on cars. Jay is eyeing him, so Sean walks over. He corrects the work Jay’s friend is doing on their car. Jay respects it.

Math class is more of a struggle. Sean can barely focus. Plus, Raditch pulls him out to ask him about the smashed vending machine. Raditch claims he’s not blaming Sean, but it’s certainly suspect that Sean is the one he asked considering how many others had lockers in the area. Sean gets a little too defensive though, and Raditch begins to suspect him for real.

Sean confronts Jay, claiming his antics got him in trouble, and they fight. They get off with a warning, but Sean has earned Jay’s respect. Jay says Sean should hang with his friends, not freaks and losers like JT, Toby and Emma. The next day, Sean helps Jay with a mod on his car. He suggests another modification. The parts are expensive, but if Jay can get them, Sean will do the labor for free.

Over lunch, Emma has organized a trash clean up at the ravine. Jay makes fun of it, and makes fun of Sean for helping. But this does provide Emma and Sean some alone time. They start making out, but are caught by Kendra. Emma is embarrassed, and Sean is annoyed that she stops the couple time to go back to the clean up.

Back inside, Emma calls Sean out for his sulkiness and they have a huge fight. It’s clear that Sean doesn’t think Emma cares about him anymore. It’s definitely not fair, and he’s definitely not expressing it well, but there are things getting in the way of them seeing each other. Some of them make sense, like Simpson’s cancer, but others are starting to wear on Sean, like Emma’s constant environmental projects.

Sweet teenaged boy just wants attention. I think Sean is in the wrong here. Emma is going through a lot, and it makes sense that her time is limited. Not to mention how angry Sean gets about all of this. But this is all part of the arc of Sean Cameron. He is problematically dependent on Emma to feel like he has value and is good, the last thing he’s ready to hear is Emma calling him pathetic.

So he goes looking for validation from somewhere else. And Jay certainly doesn’t want him to be good. Jay has a plan to get money for the parts and Sean instantly says he’s in. They sneak into the Media Immersion lab. Jay planned to steal a keyboard (instrument not computer), but Sean sets his sights higher. He steals Simpson’s new laptop.

The next day, Emma writes a cute note on a picture of herself as an apology, which I find a little self-centered. But when she approaches Sean to try and talk, he won’t even engage with her. She heads off angry, especially when Sean’s new friends say cruel things and he doesn’t stop them.

Later that day, Simpson is feeling stupid. He can’t believe his chemo brain made him replace his laptop. But (inexplicably to be honest) Emma suspects what really happened. Sean is fully into his bad boy era.

But what about the losers JT and Toby? We haven’t spent much time with them this year. Well Toby is starting a chess club, and he gets frustrated when JT skips their first meeting to have lunch with Paige and her friends.

They have a sleepover that night, and JT has a wet dream about Liberty. Toby instantly figures this out when JT doesn’t want to get out of the bed. He heard him mumbling Liberty’s name. Toby chooses blackmail — JT invites him to lunch with the cool kids or Toby spills.

Toby shows up at lunch and it’s uncomfortable. He really doesn’t fit in, and his nerdiness is rubbing the wrong way. JT makes fun of him so Toby, in just about the most awkward way possible, tells them about the Liberty dream. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s worse. It involves telling everyone that Raditch has had wet dreams.

JT confronts Toby the next day, but Toby doesn’t apologize. JT is being super dismissive and mean to him! It’s like he cares about the cool kids more. JT says it’s not that simple. Toby is genuinely his friend, and so is Paige. The problem is Toby is just never going to fit in with them, and JT is struggling to balance both friendships. Toby is hurt.

Forgive me. I have to keep this brief today. I’m very exhausted. I got to do one of my favorite things yesterday. I went out dancing with friends in a weird room in Chinatown full of mostly gay people. It’s a beautiful time that my body can’t recover from as quickly as it used to.

One of my favorite things about swinging through one of these queer parties is that I’m almost certainly going to run into someone unexpected. The LA gay scene works that way. I love seeing a friend I didn’t think I’d see, hugging and dancing. It’s nice!

Sure enough I ran into someone yesterday. He rolled in with a group of his friends, many of whom I’d met and enjoyed just fine. There were a couple people I’d never seen before. I danced with the people I came with and snaked over to dance with them too.

But at a certain point, I started feeling very weird. It wasn’t anything in particular, it was just a vibe. Obviously my friend seemed to enjoy my presence, but the rest of the group seemed a little standoffish. When I introduced myself to the new folks, one guy didn’t even tell me his name in return.

Watching this episode today made me think of that moment. There’s something here that definitely carries into adulthood. Sometimes meeting friends of friends isn’t the vibe you think it’s going to be.

I love a birthday party. And one of my favorite things about a birthday is getting to see the different spheres of friendship in a person’s life. I want to meet your work wife. I want to see you D&D group, your college buddies that live in town, your book club. There’s something so fun about bringing the social groups together.

And part of that fun is that it’s usually rare. For the most part, things don’t start blending. Some of this is surely logistical. The last thing anyone needs is a giant and difficult to manage social group that tries to move as a unit. But some of this speaks to what is so great about friendship in general.

We start friendships with people to feel connected in our shared interests. Meeting someone else who likes the same movies as me at my work place makes me feel a little less alone. We’re all just circles looking for venn diagrams to slot into, and how lovely when we find it.

But because of that, there’s a whole sphere of interests and qualities that are not shared between me and my friends. That’s kind of the point. And so that social merging of an event like a birthday becomes a demonstration of that fact. The overlap I have with one friend may be totally separate from the overlap I have with another. No wonder we don’t all click.

That doesn’t make it painless. I like my friends, and I value their opinions. If my friends like someone, I assume that’s a cool, nice person. I want cool, nice people to like me. But I am no longer in high school. As much as it may sting when a friend’s friend doesn’t seem to really click with me, I can see that for what it is now.

Usually, when I can get past the part of me that wants to be liked, I realize I’m not feeling them either. You can’t fit with everyone. It is remarkably freeing to internalize that you don’t have to like people, and they don’t have to like you, even while appreciating that your shared friend can have a beautiful connection with both sides. Sometimes we are two negative magnets who both attract the same positive magnet.

I don’t know for sure if that was the deal last night. Maybe it was the energy of the space, the various substances people were on. It was loud, not a great place for making conversation. Or maybe they just weren’t vibing with me, and trying to join part of their evening was a really misguided choice.

But then another friend at the event was someone I met through a friend that I initially wasn’t sure about. We hung out several times before we finally had a talk that made things click. But now I love that man. I didn’t know he was going to be there last night either, and it made my night.

Sometimes these things come back around. Toby should just chill.