Reunion

This friend of mine is visiting from US and she suggested that we organize a college reunion. Five years since we graduated, it will be interesting to meet everyone. This isn't a school reunion and everyone is more or less in the same profession so I was wondering what parameters they might use to judge others. I mean take any reunion movie, the nerds become super rich, the not so pretty turn into beautiful swans and the bullies end up as real life losers. We were all nerdy so its slightly harder to identify a 'success story'.

Here is a list of parameters I could come up with (I don't necessarily use these to judge others)

Is married

Married college sweet heart

Has kids

Living abroad

Studied further

Survived recession

Owns a Car

Owns a house

Gave up job to pursue dream/passion

Excelled in any other field
Aged well

I score pretty less in all above departments (except maybe the last one) but then I am not competing :P
Also while listing this I realized we often use such parameters to judge people we don't know well but not our close friends. Our friends, we revel in their success however small and grieve for their losses. For us they are always winners. Next time I brand someone as a failure, I'll remember that person could have been a friend.

On being a loser

Early this year I entered a poetry competition at work. I am no writer and certainly not a poet but I gave it a shot anyway. I figured that I probably had a small chance of winning because I was competing against my colleagues, how many software engineers wrote poetry anyway? I didn't win. But I wouldn't settle for it. They had only announced the winners, I wrote to the people who organized it to publish the winning poems so that everyone could appreciate it. Real reason was I wanted proof that the winning poems were indeed better than mine. They never responded. I then wrote to the winner congratulating him and asked him if I could read his work. He didn't respond either. I gave up after that but I concluded that there was something fishy. The winner knew the organizer perhaps. Or maybe he his work was not original and he had fooled the judges.

Yesterday we (we were a team of 2) lost at a coding challenge at work. I wont go into the details of how I think it was unfair and how we deserved to win. That will defeat the purpose of this post. What really happened was we ran out of luck, my partner thinks it was because God was angry with her. After the contest I called a friend who on hearing the news said girls cant code anyway. I wanted to murder him. Today my manager tells me he was expecting us win. It hurts. As you might have guessed by now I am not good at this losing thing. In this case what also mattered was who I lost to. Last month I lost a promotion to the same guy who won y'day. If he wasn't a good friend I would have hated him. It is not validation that I need, I know exactly where I stand. But I guess I was using this contest as forum to prove myself and it hurts because I failed at that. This might just be a silly contest but thinking about how I have reacted to all major setbacks in my life, I do exactly the same thing. I cry foul, I sulk and I mope and then I spring back to normal. I don't have a problem about the sulking and moping but I guess the crying foul has to stop. I might be wise and responsible but I still have some growing up to do. And I need to put a leash on my ego before it goes out of hand. That or I need to win more often ;)