When you least expect it

I've been hunkered down these past few days trying desperately to get a paper put to bed. I finished wrestling it into shape tonight and will be sending it off to an editor tomorrow. I hope they're kind.

After I finished saving it in a few different places, I hopped over to check my email and got some news that hit me like a blow to the stomach. See, I applied for this job a few months ago. It was pretty much the perfect job for me in every way. Not only was it just what I wanted to do, just where I wanted to do it, but I was actually perfectly qualified for it -- for every bullet point on their list I could tick off an accomplishment. I sent off my resume and have been twiddling my thumbs and trying not to hope too much ever since.
Turns out I hoped too much.
I never heard anything, but tonight, via an almost completely unrelated email, I learned that someone else got the job. And not just any someone else. A former classmate. A lovely former classmate, who is also super qualified and will do a wonderful job. But still, it was a classmate who wasn't me. And while I'm happy for that person (jobs in my field are a little thin on the ground right now), I'm crushed on my own behalf. I wanted this so badly, and I thought that I'd at least manage to get an interview or something. Maybe this was one of those cases where they had someone in mind and only advertised to give the appearance of a search -- that happens a lot, I know. Maybe I wasn't really as qualified as I thought. Maybe I made a terrible grammatical mistake in my cover letter. Maybe my application got lost under a doormat somewhere. I don't know. I'm just so bummed. And it really sucks to lose out to someone I know. Again.
I'll be fine. This wasn't meant to be, and that's okay. With all the silence from the institution, I'd been trying to prepare myself for rejection, so this isn't completely out of left field. It's just sort of a crappy thing to happen on a night when I was so happy about finishing up a project.
Boo.