MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza First day of school (public education) came and went, under terrifyingly abnormal conditions. As one parent put it, seeing the high frustration level experienced by teachers was enough to make her wish that we had had the foresight to postpone classes for one...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza For the last 20-something years, I have been trying to stop a person or persons unknown from using my byline to spread what appears to be a devotion to a canonized saint of the Catholic Church. I have nothing against religion nor saintliness, but what kind of Christians...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Those multidigit numbers collated by DOH either numb your skull or send you reeling, fueled by anxiety, panic now and again. After seven months of limitless restrictions on our movements and still we’re getting nowhere? Senior citizens, classified as “vulnerable,”...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In the 30 years that he has been a diplomat in the service of the State Department of the United States, Ambassador Sung Kim has “never made more friends” than right here in the Philippines. And he’s been everywhere, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, etc. The quote is...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza To five-year-old Marco I ask, “And when will you read me a story?” He’s in kindergarten but, because his mother took advantage of the long lockdown to drill him on sight-reading, he can easily read grade-four-level words. To my question his reply comes with a swak:...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza When I was in Korea in October 2011, they were celebrating – yes, like it was a national holiday -- the 10 th anniversary of the then phenomenal Korean TV series, Winter Sonata. Stores offered promos, restaurants cooked up special menus, the streets were decorated...
Jullie Y. Daza MEDIUM RARE Alex Lacson has produced a novel with a powerful title and an oft-repeated, unteachable lesson. The title is Five Hundred Years without Love (faint echoes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Autumn of the Patriarch?). The lessons are just as...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza When my friend sent her brother to Bulacan to buy some garden soil, neither she nor he was prepared for the volume of cars going in and out and parked in the nearest vacant lot. When Carl Balita, entrepreneur and entrepreneurial coach, advised his viewers to think of...
Jullie Y. Daza MEDIUM RARE Dr. Manuel Dayrit’s commandments to stay clear of the coronavirus stop at No. 7. The eighth commandment: Thou shall take virgin coconut oil (VCO) daily to strengthen your immune system. Dr. Dayrit, a former Health secretary, is the godfather of VCO. For decades, he has...
Jullie Y. Daza MEDIUM RARE There was a time in my younger days when my boss complained, more to himself than to me, that I was “unmanageable”; I wore the brand like a badge of honor. From that perspective and reading and watching the news today, what I see is how ungovernable we are as a bunch...
Jullie Y. Daza MEDIUM RARE Two men who do not know each other, presumably. American Marine Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton, here on R ‘n R in 2014, convicted of killing a Filipina transgender, was freed by virtue of a full and absolute presidential pardon. Bienvenido Espino, a Filipino working in...
Jullie Y. Daza MEDIUM RARE Love and sex in the time of coronavirus. How safe should it be? With STAY HOME and STAY SAFE as the salutations of the times, loverly couples are getting married nonetheless and blissfully enjoying their imaginably planned honeymoons. As predicted, unexpected pregnancies...
