Crappity crap crap crap

Just found out that I did not receive a student paper award to fund attending this conference in March. Twenty are given out, and it's impossible to figure out how many students submitted, but my field is pretty small, so it's sort of hard (at least initially) to avoid feeling like my paper was crap*. I wonder if I can contact the judging committee for feedback? I mean, this thing is, theoretically, chapter one of my dissertation, so I'd appreciate some constructive criticism before putting it out there for my department...

Blah. Plus, now I have to figure out how to prioritize and which conferences to plan to attend the rest of the year...without actually knowing which ones I'll be accepted to with/without funding. Blarg.

Ok, thinking out loud. The meeting is in DC, my favorite city, and I could see old friends and stay for free (assuming Kate doesn't rescind her gracious offer to put me up). So the cost would be a plane ticket (~$200), registration ($115), food (?), and four lost research days...at the moment, I sort of feel like I blew my wad on a barely justifiable trip to DC for a different conference just before Thanksgiving, so maybe I should pass on this one...I'm sure the advisor will have an opinion too...

*must avoid extrapolating this out to assuming that I also blew my fellowship application and am generally full of shit. must avoid road to hell.

EDIT - upon re-reading I realize that I sound whiny and entitled, but you must understand, it's difficult to get statistical students to write any sort of paper, much less papers with subject-verb agreement and the like. So it's been my experience that it's reasonable to assume you'll get 30 submissions, max, for an award like this. Some conference organizers even consider themselves lucky when they have to turn down any submissions for awards or contributed sessions or what have you. I could easily be wrong, but my knee-jerk reaction/fear is that I must have been pretty near the bottom of the pile, not some sort of assumption that I should be among the top 20 students in the country.