Fifteen Minutes Well Spent

Let me be clear about something: I’m not as easily derailed by an attractive person as people seem to assume. I have functioning executive control. I’ve demonstrated this on multiple occasions.

And yet I just spent fifteen minutes watching Palina Rojinski hop around a Russian hotel room to Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody, and I would describe the experience as genuinely hypnotic. Palina—there to cover the World Cup as a sideline reporter, which explains the hotel room—dances with the specific energy of someone who has completely forgotten the camera exists, which is either the most natural thing in the world or the most practiced, and it doesn’t matter which because the result is identical either way.

I’ve been on the internet for a long time. I have watched countless videos described to me as impressive or mesmerizing or unmissable. This is better than most of them. There’s something about the combination of the song and the room and the total absence of self-consciousness that bypasses whatever critical faculty I normally bring to watching things and lands directly in the brain stem.

I watched it again while writing this. Still works.