Tonight...

I went to Kelsey's party. I wrote a poem for K, Br, and Cl as the cards on their gift, and it made all of us cry. I swear that was not the intention. I'm just a crier. Other than the crying, it was a fun party. OH yeah, except for the awkward dancing with Justin. Man, he's 2 for 2 on the awkward questions of the night. We danced, and Claire, K, and Daniella twirled. It was weird. I wanted to twirl instead. Weird. Wow. I'm tired. And interestingly, this is the earliest I'll have gone to bed in 3 days by several hours. Whee!

My second proposal

Last night was the birthday party to end all birthday parties. We were all really really tired after ProGrad (of which I will post later), so we were a little loopy, and everything happened slowly. Really, the most interesting parts of the party happened late (as they are wont to do). Justin's presents are always epic. Last night's was no exception. It was the Mormon version of all the things I can do now that I'm 18. Candy cigarettes, spray paint, and of course dry ice were all represented. But then I reached the bottom of the bag and pulled out a ring pop. What the? He sat up, leaned over, and said "Mary, will you marry me?" *crickets chirping* "What?" "Marry me." "Whoa." Apparently you can't get married without parental consent till you're 18 either. I was surprised, but the ring pop was tasty. What's your read?

Alias 2 Hour Event

SPY MOMMY'S BACK!!!! And she's ready to rumble.

SW String Quartet

I've got my music! I'm playing the 2nd violin part of the first movement of Beethoven's opus 18 No.4 (in C minor). It's really cool. Yay! For those of you who live in or around Tucson or will be here on the 17th of June, the concert is at 7pm (I think) in the Symphony center. It will be awesome.

I've been very remiss

But hey, I've been finishing high school! It's hard work! I have to spend every spare minute signing yearbooks and saying interesting and meaningful (yet not overly mushy) things. Anyhow, the Stanford series is going to get less lengthy here for a while beacause I have a date with the GIlmore Girls Season Finale at Brett's in 45 minutes which means I have to leave in 30. Stanford:Part the Third On day number two, (oh man, I've only gotten to number two...) I went to a spanish class with my roho. The teacher was Puerto Rican, and besides talking reallyreallyfast, He was pretty intelligible. I was completely fine in the class, if not better than fine. My grammar was up to snuff, and my accent positively the best. Whee! Gotta love classes which are a level or two too easy. After class, I was due in MemAud for yet another set of speeches. They were pretty eh, but at the end, the campus improv group came out and did a pretty hillarious series of sketches. They, of course, started with the jokes I was beginning to be familiar with. They go like this: On walk two scrawny Asian kids--a voice booms, "At MIT.." One leans up to the microphone and pronounces, in a voice dripping with eau de nerd, "Such a small device with such collossal consequences!!!" The other responds, "Yes!" [nerdy laughter] A girl wanders on stage. "LOOK!!!! IT'S A GIRL!!!" She sneers. They leave. Then a girl in a sleek dress comes forth, hair bouncing. She approaches the microphone, as the other players cluster around her. "Hi! I'm Muffy, and I just love it here at Yale. New Haven is really nice, and my professors..." [BOOM!]"SHIT!" She and the others fall to the ground, covering their ears, "Was that a shot?!?" Amid much laughter and an announcement, "At Princeton," they stand, and two snappily dressed ones come to the front, a girl and a boy, strolling, noses high. The guy says "...and so I told him, if you want to play polo, you're going to have to wear Polo." He and the girl laugh snootity. "Come, Mitzi," he proclaims, "let's go have a scone." These jokes, or some variation on them, were repeated OVER and OVER and OVER. I've got to admit, they're pretty funny sometimes. (Sorry Princetonians and anyone else who is feeling miffeed.) After the speeches and the skits, we headed outside where we were met by the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band. Yes, they use the whole name. For those of you unfortunates who have never seen the LSJUMB, suffice it to say, they've been banned from several schools and United Airlines, and they dress the tie-dyed, neon-wigged, bare-chested part. They were good. Really good. And I have to leave in 5 minutes so... Next time on Stanford: Part the Fourth--Mary FINALLY gets her luggage and meets a Hawaiian.

Yearbooks

have come out. Senior yearbooks. My last high school yearbook. It's pretty cool, actually, as they go. And my senior picture features my former hair...how weird--it's been forever since I had that much hair!

New on Flickr!

30th St. #2
Originally uploaded by madcoolninjas.

This just in: Mary went to Penn. Mary took pictures. Mary has posted the first few of these. More to follow.

Numero Dos

Stanford--Part the Second When last I left you, we were about to have "Dorm Programming." This meant that they sat us all down in the Larkin Lounge and did some skits, demonstrating the danger of drinking anything, getting lost alone, walking alone, or talking to a skeezy grad student (sorry A and E). Apparently the skeezy grad student is a common species. They are supposed to ride bicycles slowly and carry messenger bags. They are to be avoided at all times. Then we arranged ourselves by state, birthday, and height, after which we split up into groups. Our group played Taboo. I cleaned up, and was named MVP by the cool triple-jumper next to me. Yay for verbal skills! Then we all got back together and played some more word games. After this, when we were all bonded up, we sat around with our HoHo's (house hosts) and asked questions about Stanford. Yay. Finally, we were released to go hang out around the dorm. This was really fun, as it was our first contact with non-Admit Weekend associated freshmen. They were much less bubbly and more, um, sane. And of course, they were cool. When 11 rolled around, we (Laura, the other ProFro in my room) and I decided to wander over to the dance party, which they'd cleverly named the "HoHo Palooza." It was everything the name implies, only slightly more nerdy if that's possible. It was there that I was introduced to the "back attack," a phenomenon I don't see a lot of in high school. The basic maneuver goes like this: Girl dancing happily by herself to bad music, completely oblivious of boy lurking in back ground. Boy works himself through sweaty masses, comes up behind girl, who is still oblivious. Suddenly, girl notices that there's someone behind her. In the suaver cases, the next thing girl notices is hands around her waist. Whoa!!! Hands!! Stranger hands!! And then you're basically trapped because backing up gives the wrong impression and going forward is impractical because of the sweaty masses. You just kind of have to go with it. Which is ok if the attacker is cute, but when he's skeezy and random, it's kind of freaky. Ahh boys. So...interesting. Round about 1 am, we ditched the party and headed back and to bed. It'd been quite the day. And here, I will leave you...until next time... Next time on Stanford--Part the Third:Mary goes to class, shakes her Spanish groove thing, and meets the very original Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band.

Cupcake lovers, rejoice!

Never more will your cupcake be lacking in definition.

Update...Part one

Whew! The BC Calc test is officially over! It was (of course) hard, but I think I did pretty well. I've only just gotten up from my official post-test nap, which was much needed. Now I have a TON of English homework, mostly left over from yesterday when Calc was top priority. The Stanford Admit Weekend was SO fun. SO. SO. FUN. Me and college? We are going to be friends. In fact, we are such friends already that the recap here will take a couple of entries. I now present: Stanford--Part the First My flight left Tucson at 6 am, so I got up at (I kid you not) 3:45. This was inhumanly early. When I got to the airport, I stumbled sleep-deprivedly toward a self check in kiosk marked "Checking Luggage." Off to the side I vaguely noted a woman ranting to the gate agent that her name was not Mary. Despite the vague rumblings of foreboding, I continued with check in, and was only slightly surprised to find that it took far fewer steps than I remembered. Nonetheless, when I caught the eye of the baggage checking lady, she only held out a stub reading "Mary Humphreys: San Jose," which she began to loop around my bag as I headed off to security. Having confirmed that I was carrying no life threatening objects like scissors or, god forbid, nail clippers, I was released by the security guards and climbed on the plane. Four hours and several naps later, I arrived in San Jose. "That wasn't so bad," I thought naively as I headed towards baggage claim. When I arrived at the carousel with the 20 or so other passengers with checked luggage and had confirmed that my first shuttle buddy (Eric of Kentucky. He's not in much of this story, so although he was very nice, don't worry about remembering him.) had also arrived, I was very dismayed to find that there was nothing but empty bins waiting there. After about half an hour of the endlessly rotating baggage waltz, I headed grimly into the Southwest customer service office to hack out some sort of deal. No one there knew anything. At all. Not even a little bit. They couldn't tell me whether the bag had gotten on the plane in Tucson or Las Vegas, or even really what day it was with any reliability. To top it all off, in true Stanford style, I had no idea where I was living, or even where I might be found at any hour of the day. Having given the Southwest zombies my cell number and vainly tried to raise anything above a busy tone at the Admit Office, I set out to alert the main troops. I called Mom. She then began her surface assault on Southwest. Meanwhile, out in the terminal, Mindi of Ohio and Vivian of Alabama had arrived. Our shuttle group complete, we headed out to meet the driver. The ride into Stanford was uneventful, which is always good in an automotive venture. When we arrived, we were given name tags (the bane of my existence. I hate being labeled. It's so irritating when people read me while speaking.) and free T-shirts. Yay for free! Then we set out in search of food. It turned out that we'd missed the picnic lunches by about 10 minutes, so our best bet was to follow the vaguely gestured directions of the swarming Stanfordites. Despite their indubitably high IQ's, no one seemed to be able to get past a general sweep of the arm in the direction of the library, so we decided to wing it. We eventually found Wilbur Hall, home of the dining hall sushi. (The pic is of some special event. Ignore the flags.) Seriously folks, it was VERY posh as college food goes. Rumor is, Wilbur has the best day-to-day food. Keep it in mind if you're ever looking for grub at Stanford. Food found, we decided to wander and try to figure out where we were while awaiting the "University Welcome" in MemAud. (Memorial Auditorium. I thought the abbreviations were stupid, but really they're quite handy so long as everyone's on the same page. It's surprising how much less effort and more fun it is to call Hoover Tower HooTow and your room host your RoHo, not to mention referring to yourself not as a Prospective Freshman, but as a ProFro. It's a classic case of "everyone else's doing it.") The University Welcome was boring. Very Boring, and nearly word-for-word the same speech as I'd heard the week before at Penn, provided of course that you replaced every instance of "Penn" with "Stanford". They can't help it. It's in their University blood. After the speeches, we went back to Tressider Student Union, where our RoHos (room hosts, remember?) picked us up in groups as dorms. I was assigned to Alexis, who lived in Larkin. (For those of you who watch the news really rabidly, yes, that is the Larkin of the Freshman 12. Yes. I saw them all, and yes, they do actually live in Larkin. Um. Yeah. Let's not tell Mom.) After finding my room and a feverish pay phone call with Mom trying to locate my luggage (again), we settled in for dinner and "Dorm Programming," which is where I'll leave you for the moment. More to follow... Next time on Stanford--Mary kicks some serious Taboo butt and is introduced to the "back attack."