The Time I Got Evicted (Part I)

(No. It wasn't for smoking...)

I turned 18 in 1999. Seven weeks later, I moved 2,477 miles away to attend college in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I chose this city because, as a kid in 1988, I'd liked its sports teams’ colors, and that allegiance had morphed into a weird, delusional fixation.

Looking back, this remains one of the luckiest, dumb breaks in a life so full of lucky, dumb breaks that I often wonder if I’ll get scolded by the Source of Creation when I die for looking so many of these gift horses in the mouth in real time, as they occurred.

Anyway, I'm lucky, because I'm old-fashioned, and in 1999, Pittsburgh was the most antiquated city in America. It was the capital of what elitists still call, "The Rust Belt," and I kid you not, my first day there, I saw two late-term pregnant women smoking.

A native Californian, this was a heck of a sight to see, as we were the first state to not just ban smoking in restaurants, but also in bars. But I wasn't upset. I'd gone there for exactly this reason. I wanted to see The Real America, and my gut said, “You’ve arrived!”

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This essay isn’t about Pittsburgh, it’s about how I got evicted from my favorite apartment ever, aka “The dumbest, luckiest break of my life.”

If you believe in kismet, this tale is for you. If you don't believe in kismet, weird, but it’s still for you. And, if you don't know what kismet is, this is especially for you.

I opened with Pittsburgh because if it weren't for my four years in a city that acted like it was 1979 in 1999, it would be hard to explain how a Californian became a self-loathing, pack-a-day smoker who would often struggle to quit for the next ten years.

And, if you didn’t know that I tried to quit every year for at least a month, you wouldn't understand why when I returned to Cali in 2009, but still smoked, I suffered a terrible feedback loop of, "You have no willpower, you’re a loser, and you’ll die alone, because California women hate smokers, and losers, and you’re both, you smoking loser."

Such was my psyche as I entered a two-year program at an all-women's college that said it “welcomed” a few men (6%) as grad students, but was also famous for reversing a co-ed vote in 1990 after students and staff barred administrators from their offices!

Those were difficult days. I was single, lonely, and glum, convinced that I'd volunteered to spend two years of my life in a place where all the girls would resent me for my gender, and where men too would sneer at my addiction to exhaling air pollution.

My only saving grace was my apartment. It was an old-fashioned, one bedroom row-apartment with great sunlight, wood floors, and the location and price couldn’t be beat. Oh, and did I mention that I was allowed to smoke inside? Talk about paradise!

Full of self-pity, my solution to my woes was not to quit smoking or face my insecurities. I opted instead to spend all my time at home (when not in class), and when at school, to take a few half-mile walks of shame to a secluded spot at the edge of campus, where I’d hurriedly huff a cig, hiding behind trees, you know, “to relax.”

Enter Kismet! (Destiny, fate. An inevitable event or series of events that will occur.)

Even if we could retrace each step that led us to where we are, we still wouldn’t know if it was fate, freewill, luck, a combo, or none of that, that led to our precipice of pondering. Regardless, sometimes we feel like something special happened to us.

That feeling is kismet.

And that’s why, in retrospect, I somehow know that if I weren't a single, lonely, nicotine-addict with a brain that says things like, “Move to a city 2,5000 miles away for 4 years, that you’ve never visited,” I’d never have listened to what it said to do next.

But I did. And I’m confident that most will agree that what followed was kismet.

Stay Tuned…

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Join me on Coffin Talk this week as I interview the boldy insightful Eric Kaplan! He is a writer and philosopher who has written for Futurama, The Flight of the Conchords, The Big Bang Theory, and Young Sheldon. His philosophy book, Does Santa Exist? deals with ontology, logic, mysticism, and the philosophy of religion and his comedy-philosophy podcast, “Terrifying Questions” (with Taylor Carman of Barnard College), is available on all apps. Oh, and he’s got a blog at: ericlinuskaplan.wordpress.com Listen here!