Sounds very much like the MAF is bad to me. If you can wait, I would get a MAF from Ed. He has them for much cheaper. But if you need the car, I can understand buying local. But if it were me, and my car had those symptoms, I would replace the MAF.
Like Sabre said, the car is going to run weird without the MAF. It has no way to gauge how much air is coming into the engine. So it has to use the preset VE table to guess how much air is coming in. Yeah, won't run exactly right. But the fact that it runs tells me that the MAF is probably bad.
Same exact thing happened to my dad. He doubted it was the MAF sensor because it was only a year old. Did that easy, little test, and acted the same as yours did. He sucked it up and replaced the MAF, and it works fine.
And yes, you can drive just fine without the MAF sensor. Again, may not run perfectly. May stall once or twice. But it will run and drive home, no worries.
