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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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Daydream
By Diana G. Mendoza
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- Apr 7
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
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
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...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Jul 7, 2019
My digital, intergalactic life
Manila — A month ago Facebook reminded me, through a video, of the date when I joined the social media platform 10 years ago. Surprised...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Jun 4, 2019
I need a hug, a parodia magnifica, and a panda
Manila — When I do my morning walks, I watch people walk with their dogs. A few people bring their cats. I grew up with cats and dogs at...
By Diana G Mendoza
- May 10, 2019
Losing my religion
Manila — I went to Catholic schools for 14 straight years of my young life, from elementary (basic or primary in other countries), high...
By Diana Mendoza
- Apr 4, 2019
Traveling in the succor of remembering
Manila — A few weeks ago, work required me to be on the road. There was a writing workshop I had to attend in an upland city; the other...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Mar 5, 2019
'They don't read Camus'
Manila — I have vague memories of when I first read a book, but what I can recall is that some time when I was in grade school, I got...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Feb 1, 2019
The movies in my mind
Manila — In the movie "Sweet Home Alabama," Reese Witherspoon has marched down the aisle to marry Patrick Dempsey when her lawyer came...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Jan 2, 2019
The sunrises that wake our lives
Manila — I'm an early riser. I always wake up at 5 am every day, even earlier. On some rare occasions, I wake up past that time when I...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Dec 6, 2018
If you believe in Santa Claus
Manila — I don’t remember any one memorable Christmas during my childhood, but most of it was replete with dreams about Santa Claus. My...
By Diana G Mendoza
- Nov 2, 2018
If I were a billionaire
Manila— As I write this, I just read somewhere again that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wears the same style of sweatshirt every day...
By Diana G. Mendoza
- Sep 30, 2018
Cherishing the one that got away
Manila — In my last column, I wrote about growing old with "the one." As I was writing it, I thought about the people who didn't make it...
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