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Little moments of happiness
Manila-- I’m an early riser. I usually get up at 5 a.m., sometimes even earlier. We early risers have our own routines. I know people who...
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Daydream
By Diana G. Mendoza
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- Jun 7
Face to face with a volcanic wonder
Manila– There is always something delightful living in an archipelago. But I only got to know about this in grade school, when our...
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- Apr 6
Living the life
Manila—As we are no longer the angst-ridden girls in our 20s grumbling about how life drags on and that things may be different one day,...
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- Mar 7
The world is not all hot pink
Manila—As I’ve been into movies lately and since we’re still reeling from Hollywood’s oldest award-giving body and the last to give out...
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- Feb 10
Will I still want to be a journalist?
Manila--I’m not comfortable with people saying journalism is dying or that newspapers are dead. I may have semi-retired when I left my...
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- Jan 7
Leaving the world behind in terror and dissatisfaction
Manila – As the writing and activities such as back-to-back media seminars wrapped up with the last days of the past year, I found time...
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- Dec 10, 2023
Saying goodbye
Manila – Stories about goodbyes are hard to read. Chats and exchanges about death, dying, leaving and being left behind are conversations...
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- Sep 9, 2023
Bangkok beckons
Bangkok – In this city that has the lingering smell of incense and curry, you can get lost and find yourself ecstatic in the chaos. This...
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- Aug 6, 2023
The baffling blank space
Manila-- Staring into space and writing always go together. An omnipresent third element that goes with the two is procrastination. I...
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- Jun 18, 2023
Life on the edge
Manila– Time is limited. Life is limited. I share this mindset with a lot of people I know who take advantage of our limited time and...
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- May 6, 2023
Our places of chaos and calm
Melbourne— "If Melbourne is home, we would like to welcome you home." My heart leaped when the flight attendant said this upon touchdown....
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- Apr 7, 2023
When life was simple
Manila—My parents’ take on what was cool when they were in college in the 1950s and 1960s and fell in love with each other was listening...
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- Mar 11, 2023
I am not a robot
Manila – In the world we live in today, checkboxes have become part of our reality. Chances are, if you’re not a human being, you’re...
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- Jan 7, 2023
A million things to do before you die
Manila—If you were to die tomorrow, what would you wish you could do? This a strange question to ask at the start of the New Year, but...
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- Dec 3, 2022
Changing the world
Manila – One of my friends quit his job as I was about to start mine. His quitting was the end of an incredible career in international...
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- Nov 4, 2022
The blonde, the serial killer and the guy who used to be famous
Manila– When I subscribed to Netflix early this year and started watching the first films and a few drama and comedy shows, I didn’t want...
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- Sep 11, 2022
Graying with grace
Manila – There is a recent scientific finding that gray hair is a sign of rapid hair growth, which runs counter to the common belief that...
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- Jul 10, 2022
Zooming out
Manila — In a recent online writing workshop, I struggled to clue in myself as I wasn’t in a good place. I told my colleagues about my...
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- Jun 5, 2022
The leaders we elect, the friends we choose
Manila—How do you maintain your peace at a time when people slug it out with their warring political views? In the past days, I haven’t...
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- Apr 29, 2022
Elections and the sound of my childhood
Manila – A certain tune stopped me dead in my tracks one day while waiting for a jeepney ride. I figured it out from the cacophony of...
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- Mar 13, 2022
Why I hate Mondays
Manila – One annoying Monday as I was doing online research, rather resentfully, I came upon the music video of a young Bob Geldof and...
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- Feb 13, 2022
Catching Covid-19 and thoughts of a eulogy
Manila—The New Year greeted me with the flu. I had chills the day after the last sound of firecrackers died down. It got worse in the...
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- Jan 9, 2022
The day I quit
Manila—On this same month last year, I quit grad school. It was my second attempt at getting a master’s degree in a social science field....
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- Dec 12, 2021
All that noise
Life Daydream By Diana G Mendoza All that noise Manila—The jarring rumble of jeepneys, the ground-shaking drill of jackhammers of...
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- Oct 10, 2021
The stories I haven’t told
Manila – Every time I declutter, I stumble onto old stuff that I thought I had thrown away. The most recent is a stack of reporter’s...
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- Sep 7, 2021
Moving on from ‘Sex and the City’
Manila – In recent weeks, photos of the stars of “Sex and the City” have been popping up all over Hollywood news while filming their...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Aug 8, 2021
When I was 35
Manila — During a chat one day with an elderly neighbor as I was coming back from an errand, she vented about the mobility restrictions...
By Diana Mendoza
- Jul 11, 2021
Behind the mask
Manila— In the summer of 2014, I walked around with an eye patch after an eye surgery to correct retinal detachment. Apart from the...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Jun 6, 2021
Happiness in a pandemic
Manila—I’m wearing lipstick as I’m writing this. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I just finished discussing health journalism during this...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- May 5, 2021
When I’m sixty-four
Manila—Thoughts about mortality have never been this constant as we are stuck in a pandemic caused by the most destructive virus in...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Apr 11, 2021
Thriving in a rough sequel to 2020
Manila— While walking one day during my routine errands, I saw street maintenance employees of city hall trimming one of my favorite...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Mar 6, 2021
A poignant anniversary
Manila – I cried on the second week of the hard lockdown in mid-March last year. It was the first time I cried in public, on a roadside,...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Feb 5, 2021
Surviving the end of the world
Manila— The year 2020 was the end of the world, or so I thought. But as I kept reading happy essays listing the best places to live in...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Jan 5, 2021
Rushing back
Manila— I realized that things became different the moment I looked at the items on the table during my first coffeeshop visit six months...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Nov 30, 2020
The sad Christmas trees
By Diana G. Mendoza Manila – I went out more often when Metro Manila’s lockdown restrictions were relaxed at the beginning of the year’s...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Oct 30, 2020
In memoriam: our life and death clichés
Manila — Death happens — if not to someone we know — to us. The only problem we have with it is how we pass its test on our level of...
By Diana Mendoza
- Oct 3, 2020
Our painful goodbyes
Manila— Every time I passed by the dimsum restaurant in my neighborhood, it was being torn down bit by bit, until a few weeks later, it’s...
By Diana Mendoza
- Sep 4, 2020
How will our stories end?
Manila – Truths, realities, epiphanies. This coronavirus pandemic is such an unprecedented ballgame it made many of us come to certain...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Aug 6, 2020
Birthday behind locked doors
Manila— I took the opportunity of the relaxed quarantine to visit the family of one of my siblings, the one who lives nearer to me, to...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Jul 5, 2020
How I spent my summer vacation
Manila – When a tropical storm and its nonstop rains darkened Metro Manila for days in early June, I realized that, in ordinary time,...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Jun 2, 2020
Six feet away
Manila— I just came from a walk in the rain. The Philippines was experiencing its first typhoon that was devastating a number of...
By Diana Mendoza
- May 2, 2020
Running for our lives
Manila— Every night at eight, the police cars sound off their sirens as they go around neighborhoods to signal the lockdown curfew. The...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Mar 31, 2020
When your soul is on lockdown
Manila — Two pylons and an iron chain in front of Ronald McDonald caught my attention as I walked to the supermarket. The fast food chain...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Feb 12, 2020
Our Valentine’s Day clichés
Manila—I’ve had two dates on a Valentine’s Day. It may look like I’m one lucky girl for having experienced that, but no, I’m not fond of...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Jan 5, 2020
Person of the year
Anyone who grew up reading Time Magazine, when it was just one of the few printed publications and before the arrival of multimedia and...
Diana G. Mendoza
- Dec 1, 2019
Our mad journeys of arrivals and departures
Manila— My most recent journey would have been perfect except for a glitch. As I was preparing to leave Africa after attending an...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Nov 4, 2019
Embracing our imperfect world
I am visually disabled. My left eye didn’t make it after a surgery last year to correct retinal detachment. It can only sense faint...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Sep 30, 2019
An ode to the coffee shop
Manila— Ernest Hemingway was said to have spent time in coffee shops writing. I read up somewhere his story about how he went to a...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Sep 6, 2019
I don’t speak Prada and I don’t care
Manila— At the start of the millennium, I had the chance to work overseas in an international organization. I was chauffeured around in a...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Aug 2, 2019
Dear younger self
Manila— I spent my birthday with a trip to one of my favorite places in the world. I was not celebrating a milestone birthday. I was just...
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