Work today was just the right amount of busy, I guess. I had a good mix of meetings and reports to complete, but I got everything done by the end of the day. I didn't have a lot of wiggle room for other things or significant downtime, so it was just enough work. A good enough day.
Our bidet had started to leak, so our main after-hours errand for the day was to get a replacement head. At first, we were hoping it was just run off from right after using it. But I kept mopping up the puddle, and I'd find a similar amount of water later in the day, so that confirmed it was leaking. Maybe there were other solutions to address why the head was leaking, but it felt simpler to just get it over with. We had heard too many horror stories from our previous condo's maintenance team about how busted bidets were typically the main cause for flooded units.
In other considerations, it has been 25 years since I graduated high school, and there's a lot of rah-rah going on for the grand alumni homecoming at the end of the year. But as one of the Juliarian batches, there's an expectation to raise funds for the school and charities of our choice as part of the homecoming effort. One can't help but be annoyed that alumni discussions are inevitably tied to fundraisers and this supposed debt of obligation we have to "give back". But it's also the year of an unprecedented gas crisis and many other hardships, and is it really the most important thing to raise money for your school? And it's not like we didn't have to participate in other fundraisers while we were still in school.
Our high school years were right at the height of the "10-year development plan", an effort that included line-items for what we had to pay alongside tuition, and a lot of different fundraising activities all for the benefit of the future of the school. Fast-forward to today, and searching for "Ateneo 10-year development plan" just brings up the ongoing efforts for 2021-2030, because Ateneo is always raising money for the future of the school. It's a weird, never-ending cycle that continues to pressure students and alumni to keep the school going - a monetary concern that persists despite how the school continues to have some of the highest tuition rates in the country.
I value the friendships I made in high school, and I'd love to hang out with my old classmates. But I have to admit that the fundraising stuff and the big alumni event feel like so much noise, just acting as a distraction from actual bonding with my friends. There has to be a better way to address all priorities in a manner that doesn't make the money side of things feel so...icky.
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