Don't name it

"So what are you doing for a living?"
"err, I am unemployed"

The guy who asks me a standard question turns away from me after I have said the truth about the current status of my market value. I always thought crises are interesting. They create news and emotions don't they? What seems to be true for European countries is not true for a woman in her twenties. Instead of being interviewed I am being ignored. I am trying to find out what the guy does for a living by listening to his conversations with other people. He says he has finally managed to rent his beautiful flat in an old building to a Chinese woman. Unfortunately when she moved in she was visited by a flock of bats that came through the window to scream and claw into the living room curtains. He had to chase them out, he says. His story is entertaining, some girls around him start laughing. I step out onto the balcony, the party guests hardly fit into the flat. Stuttgart is a bad place to be unemployed. Rents are among the highest in Germany and people mostly define themselves through their jobs. My flatmate is one year older than me and will soon be made a partner at the architecture office where she works. Her room is full of boxes with names on them, no paper is lying around, this room could immediately be turned into an exhibition space or a café , bland but stylish where people would come with their apple computers to work over a cup of double espresso or a glass of hot fresh mint and ginger tea. Whereas she has managed to use a maximum of three colors and shapes in her rooms, mine looks like an explosion of all kind of materials, styles, phases, full of trash, child memories, unread books, study materials and clothes with holes in them. The chaos is out in the open, the cupboards are bursting. I switch on the internet radio which fills the room with coincidential sounds from across the world. My back is stiff from sitting, from waiting that the world comes to me through the magic rotten radiation of the web. Inter-net, inter-national, inter-related, inter-galactic. I wish my spine was a snake that could sneak out of that body of mine, so I don't have to go upright anymore.