Daydream

Manila—Be kind to yourself. The world is cruel enough. Of the dozens of life hacks that I read about almost daily, my favorite is the one...

Manila – A work-related trip recently brought me to Subic Naval Facility, the site of one of the two former U.S. military bases in the...

Munich  – My first view of Munich was the sight of the dark orange sun setting outside my airplane window. The plane was touching down at...

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...

Manila– There is always something delightful living in an archipelago. But I only got to know about this in grade school, when our...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Manila – Stories about goodbyes are hard to read. Chats and exchanges about death, dying, leaving and being left behind are conversations...

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...

Manila-- Staring into space and writing always go together. An omnipresent third element that goes with the two is procrastination. I...

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...

Melbourne— "If Melbourne is home, we would like to welcome you home." My heart leaped when the flight attendant said this upon touchdown....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Manila – One annoying Monday as I was doing online research, rather resentfully, I came upon the music video of a young Bob Geldof and...

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...

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....

Life Daydream By Diana G Mendoza All that noise Manila—The jarring rumble of jeepneys, the ground-shaking drill of jackhammers of...

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...

Manila – In recent weeks, photos of the stars of “Sex and the City” have been popping up all over Hollywood news while filming their...

Manila — During a chat one day with an elderly neighbor as I was coming back from an errand, she vented about the mobility restrictions...

Manila— In the summer of 2014, I walked around with an eye patch after an eye surgery to correct retinal detachment. Apart from the...

Manila—I’m wearing lipstick as I’m writing this. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I just finished discussing health journalism during this...

Manila—Thoughts about mortality have never been this constant as we are stuck in a pandemic caused by the most destructive virus in...

Manila— While walking one day during my routine errands, I saw street maintenance employees of city hall trimming one of my favorite...

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,...

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...

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 Manila – I went out more often when Metro Manila’s lockdown restrictions were relaxed at the beginning of the year’s...

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...

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...

Manila – Truths, realities, epiphanies. This coronavirus pandemic is such an unprecedented ballgame it made many of us come to certain...

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...

Manila – When a tropical storm and its nonstop rains darkened Metro Manila for days in early June, I realized that, in ordinary time,...

Manila— I just came from a walk in the rain. The Philippines was experiencing its first typhoon that was devastating a number of...

Manila— Every night at eight, the police cars sound off their sirens as they go around neighborhoods to signal the lockdown curfew. The...

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...

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...

Anyone who grew up reading Time Magazine, when it was just one of the few printed publications and before the arrival of multimedia and...

Manila— My most recent journey would have been perfect except for a glitch. As I was preparing to leave Africa after attending an...

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...