I am emotionally invested in Jim and Pam's relationship.

August 9

I ended up staying up until 3 a.m. on Friday night (or, I suppose more correctly, Saturday morning) watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. They didn’t start until midnight NZ time, but I wanted to see them anyway. They were interesting, I thought, and really impressive in the sheer number of people involved and the detail focused on. The light elements and tricks were especially impressive (though, we’ve now since learned some of them were fake. Booooo.). The drummers that opened the ceremony (thousands of them, all perfectly in time) were pretty amazing. I could have really gone to bed around 1:30, but it was around that time that James and I started talking politics and foreign affairs. Which was both interesting and strange, but apparently not too strange, because it continued for over an hour. So I rationalized that I would stay up until I saw team USA march in, because I was curious to see who was our flag bearer. But between talking about Bush and Somalia, I must have missed it.

I woke up Saturday and packed my bags before meeting Andrea at 1 so we could head out to Jamie’s place in Ngaio (pronounced Nai(with a long i)-o, for those who aren’t familiar with the silent g’s New Zealand is so fond of). Our plan was to hole up in Jamie’s house (since her host family was out of town for the weekend) and watch as many episodes of “The Office” as we could and stuff ourselves with as much junk food as possible. We were very successful on both fronts.

Andrea and I made our way to the train station without incident on Saturday afternoon. I was pretty excited, because I’ve never ridden a proper train in daylight before. Only one to Eden Park at night for the All Blacks game in Auckland, and that overnighter train we took in between Shanghai and Beijing in China last year. But it seems I’m just not meant for daytime train travel, because the Johnsonville line (which would have delivered up to Ngaio) was out of service for the weekend for track maintenance.

So we caught a bus instead. But this was problematic, because I’ve never been to Jamie’s before, and Andrea has only been there taking the train, and neither one of us paid much attention to the directions Jamie had given us in the event we had to take the bus because we didn’t expect to have to. Phew. Luckily, I had skimmed them over well enough to know we needed to take a bus going in the direction of Khandallah, and Andrea remembered enough of the street names to figure out where we needed to get off.

Once we got off the bus and convinced ourselves we were lost, we found Jamie’s house. Turns out we just walked in a big loop a lot further than we actually had to. Oh well. It was a nice day at that point, and we got some good views out over Ngaio Gorge.

Upon arriving at Jamie’s, we laid out all our junk food, changed into sweats, rearranged the living room for optimal viewing pleasure, and started in on Season One of “The Office.”

I’d never really seen a full episode before, and I’m not sure why. The show never really appealed to me, and I have a feeling I always held some mysterious grudge against it for being a rip-off of a perfectly good British comedy. In my mind, it wasn’t far from trying to pull off an American version of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; I didn’t think it would work.

But I have been proven wrong. After a 13-hour marathon with only a short break in which I made some phone calls to Mom, Baba and Dave, I have to say that I quite enjoyed what I saw of “The Office.” We didn’t even make it all the way through Season Two, but I can say a few things for sure so far: Dwight is hilarious. Jim is adorable. And I’m certainly emotionally involved in the relationship between him and Pam. Yes, I know it continues on for a while, but remember I’m still on Season Two! Please don’t ruin it for me. Just let me be invested.

We finally called it quits around 3 a.m. I think the sugar and dancing to the theme song every episode helped us stay up so long, but, once 2:30 hit, I think it’s safe to say we were all starting to crash. (Seriously… we filled up a whole coffee table with junk food, most of it sugar-based, and didn’t stop eating all day and night. It was bound to hit us eventually.)

Once we couldn’t possibly keep our eyes open for another episode, Andrea and I each claimed a sleeping bag and a couch (though we’d both come prepared with pillows, blankets, and, in Andrea’s case, stuffed animals), nudged our way closer to the heater, and were out before long.


I’m really looking forward to our follow-up marathon. Hopefully it will come soon. I don’t know how long I can live in such suspense!