Can I call you Jeff, Giga? 

This has happened to me a couple times lately.  It doesn't happen every time.  When it hangs up too long, I just force quit Minecraft, then restart.  Not sure why it hangs up and I know it's kind of a Larry, Curly, and Moe solution, but it's worked for me.

Max

No, not a Mac issue. My windows-operating PC is having trouble with MC loading.

Mine is a little slow as well but it always loads eventually ahah I would recommend trying to uninstall and install again. They're probably aware of the issue seeing as how I highly doubt you're the only person experiencing it.

-gg

well after searching the weeb and MC forums, apparently I am not the only one with this type of issue. 

It's "normal", meaning it's the launcher fault.

When you get stuck, don't just close the launcher, open your task manager and kill the process (javaw if you use Windows). If there are 2 processes with the same name, kill both (one is the launcher, the other is the game that failed to load).

After that, restart the launcher and as soon as you can click on "play offline", then let it update/load.

The launcher process really loves to remain in the background even if you choose to close it while playing(blame Mojang, not Java) and sometimes it gets stuck even after showing that the update is finished.


PS:
The problems with the launcher aren't anything new, it's been like that (ghost process, lack of real tools, crash reports basically useless) since they changed it in 1.6 and I find amusing that each time a few users raise a red flag due to a really annoying problem, it takes 3+ versions to make them realize that the problem actually exist.