I don’t go on Facebook often because I hate getting sucked into the Facebook time warp, you know, when you go to look at one person’s profile and suddenly three hours have gone by and you’re 11 friends removed from the original person you were searching for, staring at wedding photos of a complete stranger. When you finally come to, it’s like waking up from an eating binge, except instead of being surrounded by discarded food wrappers and empty cookie tins, you’re plagued by the semi-pornographic images and inane wall posts of Jerry and Chris and Freida and Helen and Robert and Steve and Sue and that guy with the weird tattoo and pet chameleon. What the…? Where am I? Who the hell are these people, and why did I spend nearly all of my free evening with them?

However, this past Friday night I learned that YouTube has the same time-suck qualities. It started innocently, with me browsing Tokyo Disney’s website (a normal activity for a Friday night, right?) and seeing that the park’s Enchanted Tiki Room features Stitch. I love Stitch, so I went to YouTube to find a video of the attraction.

I found one, but then out of nowhere I thought, “Hell, I’m on YouTube now; let me search for a video of Southwest’s Shamu plane taking off!” (Like you do.)


And I did. Two and a half hours later, these were the things I had watched on YouTube:

• Southwest’s Shamu One landing and taking off at various U.S. airports.
• A plane landing during a snowstorm in Montana.
• Various videos of planes landing in a crosswind (woah).
• An airplane getting struck by lightning.
• Various videos of approaches and take-offs on difficult/unique runways (e.g., Kai Tak in Hong Kong, Tegucigalpa Honduras Toncontin, Gibraltar, St. Barts, St. Maarten [about 8 separate videos for St. Maarten, because it’s INSANE]).
• Cockpit-cam videos of take-offs and landings.
• The Boeing Dreamlifter taking off and landing.
• Giant-ass planes (e.g., UPS cargo jets, 747s, A380s) taking off and landing.
• Various children dressed as Wall•E for Halloween (+ one dressed as an Axiom hover chair).
• The real-life talking/walking Wall•E at various events.
• Several videos of the before-it-broke Yeti on Expedition Everest (it used to move; now it’s just illuminated with a strobe light).
• A complete POV ride-through of Expedition Everest (even though I have physically been on the ride myself like, 20-something times).
• Spaceship Earth ride-through…with a night-cam!!
• Ride-through of Tokyo DisneySea’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (awesome!).
• Don’t forget the ride-through of Tokyo’s Tower of Terror!
• And Tokyo’s Monsters Inc. Ride and Go Seek!
• Ride-through of Indiana Jones at Disneyland (half night-cam; half with the attraction’s lights on).
• Behind-the-scenes videos of both the T-Rex and velociraptor from Jurassic Park.
• Video of some dumb kid jumping into the landing zone of the Jurassic Park ride at Islands of Adventure to grab his hat.

I finally broke free from the YouTube bubble slightly past midnight–not good for a girl who was eager to catch up on sleep. I felt disgusted with myself, spending an entire Friday night sitting in an IKEA Poang chair, hunched over a laptop, clicking on links that read “Expedition Everest Yeti Up Close Pics!” and “These Are Some Damn Good Airline Pilots 2!”

The morning after was not as bad…only a few minutes watching cats riding on Roombas, Roombas bumping into sleeping dogs, and a baby riding a Roomba (inspired by watching the “DJ Roomba” episode of Parks and Recreation the previous night).

Now I’m ever-so-curious…What embarrassing/geeky/guilty-pleasure videos have you sought out on YouTube??