Before I get to the juicy, tender meat of my story, lemme give you a little background on my current living situation. It can actually be summed up simply: I occupy a Shame Cave (i.e. the same bedroom I had in high school) in my parents’ house. Not the ideal situation, to be sure, but I’m saving up for a house of my own and I gotta do what I gotta do. Judge if you must but if you do, allow me to rebut your judgement with a response that is effectively succinct: up yours. Now, that being said, I present “The YouTube” Story.
So, a little over a month ago, I come home from work and I’m in the kitchen warming up my dinner and I see my mom in the family room watching Oprah (an episode that she TiVo’d). Oprah was standing in front of this big YouTube banner and she was evidently interviewing different people who had videos on YouTube (at the time she was talking to some guy who had a dog that he’d trained to ride a skateboard). I’m still piddling around in the kitchen and my mom says to me, “Do you ever watch the YouTube?” Thinking that maybe I didn’t hear her correctly, I said, “Huh?” From there the conversation went like this:
Mom: Do you ever watch the YouTube?
Me (now laughing hysterically): Do I ever watch “the YouTube”? You
can’t just go and watch “the YouTube”. It’s a website that you go to.
Mom (also laughing): What do you do there?
Me: You look at video clips.
Mom: Video clips of what?
Me: Jesus! Video clips of everything. Any clip you want to see, you’ll
probably be able to find it on YouTube.
Mom (still laughing): Well, how do you get to it?
Me (laughing even harder): Uh, you go to YouTube.com.
Mom: That’s it? Just YouTube.com?
Me (in a really slow voice so she doesn’t miss anything): You go to
www (pause) dot (pause) YouTube (pause) dot (pause) com.
Mom: And then what do you do?
Me (wondering what she must’ve thought of Oprah’s show if she didn’t
know what YouTube was): Well, you know the search bar?
Mom (staring blankly): …..
Me: You know when you go to Amazon and you have that little bar where
you type in what you want to find?
Mom: Yeah….
Me: Well YouTube has that too. You just type in what you want to see,
hit enter, and it brings it up.
Mom: What would I want to see?
Me (both highly amazed and highly amused): Whatever you can think of.
Like if you wanted to see a clip of Oprah’s show or something, you
could find it.
Mom: Well I watch the show, why would I want to find an Oprah clip?
Me (grinding my palms into my eyes to make sure I’m not
hallucinating): That’s just an example, Mom. You could check out
anything.
Mom: Gotcha.
Honestly, sometimes it feels like I’m living with two mental patients. My dad goes from room to room playing different harmonicas (this isn’t an exaggeration, he actually has something like 2 dozen different harmonicas, each in a different key. He even keeps a harmonica in his car) and my mom is asking me about “The YouTube” (which shouldn’t surprise me really since this woman, after all, was the one who didn’t use a computer for the longest time because she kept “losing” the mouse cursor). Un-freakin’-believable. But hilariously entertaining.