June 6, 2022: Pre-MOP :)

I’M AT MOP!!!!

The flight was uuuugh.

Enough said.

To be fair, it was also a bit amusing. The thing is, I was sitting at the gate for SFO, right? And I knew, by virtue of my mother, that KS, the girl I was flying from SFO to Pittsburgh with, had already made it into the airport. So then I saw this roughly teenage (maybe, like, a really old-looking teenager?) woman walking past, Asian, glasses, and wearing pink, who seemed to glance at me slightly before moving on. So I figured, this must be KS! I send KS a message asking her if she’s here yet, decide that I can’t wait that long, and go up to the pink lady and ask, Hey are you Kristie?

No, no she wasn’t. No, I’m not Crusty, sorry?

I sit back down awkwardly. Ten or twenty minutes later, KS shows up and is like Hi, and I’m like Hi, and we spend the next hour in awkward silence.

Then, on the actual flight, we weren’t actually seated together. Instead, I was sitting next to a guy who was looking all around himself curiously. Apparently, this is the first time he’s ever taken a plane. He was pretty funny.

At some point, he started watching a movie about some guy named Happy starting to play golf even though he likes hockey. At that point, we’d already set flight, but I wasn’t having any luck falling asleep. Now, the thing is, my flight was from 11:55 pm to 7:52 am. So naturally, I figured I’d get eight hours of sleep, so if I spend two of those eight hours watching a movie instead, surely it wouldn’t be too bad?

Based on that logic, I’m sure it’s easy to tell that I’m as incredibly intelligent, mature, and sensible as going to MOP would suggest.

Because guess what? There’s such a thing as time zones.

So instead of the six hours that I projected, I got 3 hours of sleep. Go figure!

Eventually, the plane lands. KS and I meet up again and we drive to CMU. The only other person who’d already arrived at CMU was VivL, but only because she literally lives there.

While there, we meet Turtle, a grader for MOP, and his sister, Sophie.

Like, wow, great name.

We hung out a bit until eventually, more girls began to trickle in. (Pre-MOP is the two days before MOP, during which the thirteen girls get to know each other and get pampered, as RZ describes. Then, tomorrow, the boys will arrive and chaos will begin.) They trickled in really slowly, though, so I spent a while sitting in Kristie’s room, and every time I heard a door opening from outside, I’d poke my head outside and be disappointed when it was MK and LZ, rather than any MOPpers I hadn’t yet met.

That night, we played a complicated game of charades. Each player wrote a few phrases, put them into a plastic bag, and then passed the bag around. There were three rounds, using the same pool of phrases: Round 1 was explaining the phrase in words without saying any of the words, Round 2 was acting it out silently, and Round 3 was saying only one word as a hint with no auxiliary actions.

My phrases, which I came up with using the assistance of a random word generator, were:

• “The cinema did not hesitate to fly.”
• “The rabbit ate obscure cake on the moon.”
• “The rise and fall of the era of the forks.”
• “The island tempest cast a hurricane spell.”

There was also a lot of stuff like “IZ is really good at math,” to the extent that IZ is kind of a meme of goodness? And there was also A LOT of math stuff. There was also a “geo is the best” and a “geometry is the worst.”

The piano is atrocious. Like, truly. There are ants crawling all over it and the pedal doesn’t work and the touching is off.

JW was supposed to come in pretty early, but her flight got canceled so she only came in at 10ish. We were all in the lobby, so we played a sort of prank on her by singing happy birthday at her. (it’s not her birthday)

---

Then, today, we spent the morning doing math (just working on the MOP homework, basically), and then in the afternoon, we just played games and had fun. We played Mao, and some of the extra rules we did were:

• Failure to bless the newlyweds
  • When a Q&Q, Q&K, K&Q, or K&K is placed, one must say “God save the queen/king and her/his wife/husband.”
• Failure to not drown (Jessica)
  • When a 9 is placed, must say “I don’t want to drown” or something to that effect
• Failure to stay hydrated (Kristie)
  • Say “Boba tea” when placing a card starting with a t
    • We were all trying to overthink it and add cards or something

We also went on a walk after lunch and went to a playground. It was a lot of fun. There was a turn-y thing that turns one really fast. We also met SR, a really cool instructor.

At night, after dinner, we set out for boba and waffles that were a thirty-minute walk away. We left around 8 pm and walked for thirty minutes to the waffe place, where we sat for around twenty minutes. Then, we went to a boba place, where we stayed around 30 minutes, and returned to the dorm at around 10:20 pm.

While at the boba place, we ran into a few boys from San Diego (DX, DerL, and EL). They were MOPpers who’d arrived a bit early! At some point, we saw another Asian boy in the shop, so the boys went up to him and asked if he was a MOPper, as well.

He wasn’t.

During the walk to and from boba and waffles, I suggested playing a game with JW where we made up a story based on some of the phrases I came up with for the charades game. I would say a few sentences of the story, then she would say a few sentences, and we’d keep switching until the story ended. The story for the forks went as follows (or something like this, anyway):

The forks decide to revolt against humans because humans keep failing at washing forks well (and maybe also because humans keep accidentally biting fork tines off). After the forks take over, the sporks decide to rebel. I think at some point there was a remote controlling a bunch of nuclear bombs in the forks’ possession, and then a spork hero sets out on its hero’s journey to retrieve the remote. At some point, the spork hero runs into some storks and picks up a baby. Then, as they’re flying somewhere, the stork drops the spork and the baby in an isolated town in the middle of a forest. There is a zombie apocalypse going on in this town. The spork hero is chased about for a while and then ends up in a zoo, at which point the spork decides to rescue an elephant and possibly a monkey of some sort. Then the elephant is so heavy that it causes an earthquake and the lot of them land in an underground labyrinth. They run into three puzzles, and through the power of the baby crying, being cute, and causing accidents, they stumble through puzzles to the end of the labyrinth. At that point, they find the remote, accidentally press it, and end the world.

Or something.

I don’t really remember if that’s actually how it ends but knowing me, that’s probably how it ends.

(When recounting this story to the other MOPers on discord, I was like, “JW, am I missing anything?” And HZ says, “any sense of logic.” lol thanks, dude.)

Now I am sleepy.