Like April 1st all over again.

Eating pretzels in the library during my carefree undergrad days.

I got a rejection letter today.

I wasn't turned down for my dream job after a month of rigorous background checks and nerve-wracking interviews or anything like that. That kind of rejection letter is the terror of the mature job seeker, a class which I have yet to join (although I'm starting to suspect that with my new qualifications, I would have an easier time finding full-time employment than the part-time summer work I'm looking for now -- damn you, high schoolers). It wasn't even technically a letter, more like an email notification that I should log into an online account to check the message in my one-way inbox, but it was definitely a rejection. University of X does not, in fact, want me in their graduate program, and they made no attempts to soften the blow:

"We are unable to consider you for a place on this programme as the information you provided in support of your application did not meet the standard we require."

I'm biased, but that sounds like kind of a bitchy way to put it, no?

It's not the first time I've had higher education turn me away. I'm not yet at a point in my life where I feel secure enough in myself to advertise just how many colleges turned me down as an aspiring seventeen-year-old with a decent GPA but killer standardized test scores (the telltale indicator of lazy smart kids across the nation), but suffice it to say that my heart knew a lot of brokenness the spring of 2009 that had very little to do with teenage boys.

A little over four years later, I have a bachelor's degree with honors from a well-ranked institution, I've worked six different jobs (four of them simultaneously at one point), I've flown across the ocean and back a few times, I've conversed in French with actual French people, I'm ranked in the top 1% of Scramble with Friends players globally, I make people laugh sometimes, and now I'm applying to graduate school with enthusiastic references from two professors I respect and admire. If that all sounds like I'm being a bit defensive in order to remind myself that I'm not generally a failure in life, it's because I am. Practice does not make rejection perfect.

Proof of my mild distinction.

The good news is that I have two other universities willing to take me on for a Master's in Modern Literature, and I'm holding out hope for another six. Unless dire circumstances strike in the next two months or so, I'll be a graduate student somewhere in England this coming fall -- or a postgrad, as they call it -- and I'll be so over University of X. For now, their rejection is a fresh bruise, but I've always thought bruises were kind of pretty, all colorful and mottled, and so full of character. I'll move on, and I'll almost -- but never completely -- forget about it. I'll go somewhere else, and they'll be sorry it's not there.

Also I unfollowed them on Twitter. Take that, jerks.