With great travel comes great deadlines and missed blogging.

I've antedated pictures from my Europe trip, starting with Hamburg today. I'm brimming with pretension up to here (places hand above throat) and I'm short of chronicling how my flight was, how clean were the strasses and the straats compared to our kalyes or how I felt my skin color change from brown to pink or how I learned to drink Pinot Grigio during a hunky meal of salmon pasta when I can do away with Coke back home.

I felt so First World, and forgot where I came from and it's sickening and I miss the thawing snow and the goth girls and skinheads who say "Langsam, no English" to a brown monkey in a knitted beanie and fake pashmina muffler.

Get them here. Dresden and Nijmegen later.

Quote by Douglas Adams.

The governing question is, if the current situation is a reprise of the first People Power, the media is stifled and the Philippine blogosphere will become the new Radyo Bandido, who will be our June Keithley?

Filipinos just love sequels, and in the process, we romanticize them too. We have the speeches, the communists, and of course, the jokes. We've got nostalgia for the Diliman Commune. I am not playing the efforts down, but I guess I'm not ready for another. 1986 was yellow versus red with nothing in between. I was nine years old. If you're not for Cory then you're automatically for Marcos. That was how divided we were then, you can see a solid line running across Philippine society. Previously it's a matter of timing and I'd go where my parents stood, but now I stay away by choice.

It's a different case when colors mingle with each other and we are left with an undesirable shade of muck. Cory in bed with Jinggoy and Imee? Blech. The so-called middle class just won't buy it. I have qualms calling myself part of the middle class. Maybe I am because I take a day job and I am taxed. And I, well, have plans of working abroad too. But that's for another discussion. It's just that the middle class maybe facing extinction, and we don't sell that well and we have no plans of marketing ourselves to the left or the right in the current situation. They can exploit the poor and the rich would take sides where profit is higher. And the middle class, we just let ourselves be. The advantage of being in the middle is that the view is better. We can see who is doing who with what. We've tasted totalitarianism in the offices we work for--forbidden internet sites, unpaid overtime hours, cutesy-wootsy newsletter writing and crackdowns on plans to set up a union. Proclamation 1017, bring it on.

Yet we are ambivalent and would not want to miss another opportunity without being opportunistic. The sad part is that we're waiting for somebody with credibility, or at the minimum the charisma to lead us or at least be our anchor, like frizzy-haired Cory back in 1986. Seeing Guingona and Alcuaz waving a United Middle Class banner makes me cringe. Our criteria is not as high as Che Guevarra but I think that would be a bonus.

I just hope it won't take another twenty years, as my application for immigrant visas are much shorter.