...the more things stay the same.

You know the feeling-- your balls hug up against the bottom of your stomach, your heart beats like the drums on the first day of middle school band class, and you mind jumps to every single moment during the past semester where you decided to watch I <3 New York.

Esther's Wrath is what I'd call it. You'd call it something else, depending on your college's student management site is called. Mine's called Esther.

It's masochism, how often I've checked my final grades between exams and now. I know what I should do is just wait until the grade submission deadline to peek at those negative letters. After all, the work has all been turned in. The deed is done. There's nothing left to do but wait until the dose hits the tubes, yet I torture myself by F5ing the hell out of the "Spring 2007 Final Grades" page from the last day of exams onward.

But despite my utter addiction to that split-second cocktail of fear and regret, my grades are back.

Subject	Course	Course Title	Final Grade	Attempted	Earned	GPA Hours
ELEC	220	FUNDAMENTALS OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING	B-	4.000	4.000	4.000
ELEC	242	FUNDAMENTALS OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING II	B-	4.000	4.000	4.000
ELEC	262	INTRODUCTION TO WAVES AND PHOTONICS	B	3.000	3.000	3.000
ELEC	391	PROFESSIONAL ISSUES IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING	A	1.000	1.000	1.000
ENGL	175	GLOBAL LITERATURES IN ENGLISH	P	3.000	3.000	0.000

I think I'm doing pretty well to have B's and A's attached to my transcript this semester. It was another set of months that brought challenges both socially and academically, and each set would have been quite enough work on its own. But I pulled through and proved that once again, I can't be an atheist because there's some mighty power pushing me towards success.

I guess I could think of this semester as the entirety of Seinfeld. If anyone remembers the first and last episodes of the series, they'll recall that the show ends on the same joke as it started. My joke of a GPA also hasn't budged... I actually got the perfect combination of grades to keep the damn thing from going up or down.

But wait, I take that back. I hate people that frown on me for having a GPA .04 below 3.0. You know what a 3.0 is at Rice? It's an 85% success rate in your classes, exactly. You know what a 2.96 is? It's like... something. I don't know, I've turned my math brain off for the next couple weeks. But you know what I'm saying. I'm not doing dismal at all.

So once again, I've pulled it out of my ass. With a little help from my friends.

Thanks, friends. Really.