Category: love

family, friendship, home, love, New York, relationships

A Year in the Making

Christa Avampato

I walked around all day yesterday trying to figure out what was so special about  June 11th. And finally, in Columbus Circle, it hit me – I moved back to NYC exactly one year ago. I drove up to NYC with my car full of worldly possessions – very little in fact since I had sold nearly everything I owned before leaving school. I had a relatively clean slate, save for my friends and family. It felt freeing to completely release the life I had known in Virginia just 24 hours earlier, to return to a place that felt like home and yet had so many new experiences to offer. 


One year later I am gainfully employed, spending time with my friends, many of whom have known me for a number of years during different phases of my life, writing every day, and living in my favorite neighborhood in New York. My family is an hour and a half away – an easy train ride. I have a new niece. There’s a rhythm to my days, and to my life. I kind of feel like June 11th is my adopted birthday – it’s the day I became more of who I am. On June 11th, I felt like I became an artist, a writer, again.


My first year back in NYC isn’t what I expected. It’s filled with many people whom I didn’t know when I arrived, and those who I saw only a few times a year for many years. Now I take my mom to brunch in the city, I go to dinner with Lisa and Dan and Steve and Brooke and Rob. Friends like Amy and Trevin and Anne and Alex and Kelly come to visit. I go to see Ken during a free weekend. And many friends have moved back after being away for so long, just like me. Somehow, by magic I think, a life came together for me that I never even knew was here. And all the while, I think it was waiting for me to get back home.


In this next year back in NY, I’m working to get my writing out to the world a bit more and I’m trying to find my professional niche. I’m working on meeting Mr. Wonderful, and I’m getting back into shape with my yoga, running, and weight training. (I’ve fallen off the wagon in both regards lately.) I’m taking a comedy writing class to improve my writing as much as to increase the amount of laughter in my life. And I’m recommitting to make sure that I honor my time as my most valuable asset. 


It feels good to be home.   

love, memory, Nashville, travel

What, and who, used to be in Nashville

Christa Avampato

During my long weekend in Nashville, my friend, Dan, and I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express close to downtown. It took me a day to realize that the hotel was across the street from the Union Station Hotel, where I stayed back in 2000 during my first trip to Nashville. It was early on in my first theatre tour – a production of Sunset Boulevard. 

Dan I took a stroll over there yesterday afternoon. In the Union Station, I had my first of many meals that I would have with Petula Clark, the star of the tour. I was seated down in the lobby having breakfast and she asked if she could join me. And of course I said yes. To this day, she’s the greatest person I’ve ever worked with. The magnificent stained glass ceiling is the same, as are the rooms around the atrium, but the breakfast bar is gone. Even though I can clearly remember that breakfast with Petula as if it happened yesterday.

Next door to Union Station is a restaurant called the Flying Saucer. In that space, I met Susan Schulman, the director of the Sunset tour, and the first well-known director I had ever met up to that point. It was also the place where I first talked to a man that I would eventually fall in love with and be involved with, off and on, for several years. 5 years ago, that man was in a motorcycle accident that would cause him to become a quadriplegic, though in truth he was lucky to survive at all. And that first conversation with him is so vivid to me that it could have just happened.  

It’s a funny thing about places – they serve as the backdrop of the events that comprise our lives and yet they often don’t retain any of the physical evidence that we were there or that anything significant happened to us in their walls. What’s amazing about Nashville is that every place seems to house a story, or many stories. That city lives, and breathes, and of course, sings.

love, movie, New York, New York Ciy, relationships, Sex and the City, single

32 and single is okay

Christa Avampato

With the upcoming release of the Sex and the City movie, the idea of 30-something women in New York City pursuing successful careers, love, and happiness is being brought to the forefront of the minds of women like me. While I would never spend $1500 on a handbag or a pair of shoes, even if I had that kind of money to spend on such things, I certainly relate to some of the pursuits of the characters in that hit show. 

So it was with a little surprise that I went to a party last week and was told by another young woman that if a 32-year old found a man there’s no way she’d ever move to another city just to pursue a job opportunity, no matter how incredible the job. I was a tiny bit hurt (emphasis on the “tiny”), though was more disappointed with the person. For one thing, she knew I was a 32 year old single woman, and her characterization of women my age being desperate to find a man is completely off the mark. Would it be great to find love? Sure. Am I going to pass up incredible career opportunities in the hopes that a current boyfriend is the love of my life? No way. I wouldn’t want him to either, so why would I ask that of myself?

The other point that really gets me is that people who are in relationships often assume that the goal of all single people is to find a mate. It’s as if we must be sitting around hoping and praying that he’ll “find us”. Give me a break! I love my friends, my career, my family, my creative pursuits. They’re my focus. I’m not waiting for my true love to “rescue me” from my single life. Again, would it be great to meet a guy whom I connect with on a deep level whom I love and respect and admire? Yes, definitely. Does it consume my waking hours? No way – it’s a passing thought from time to time. And maybe somewhere down the line it happens, and maybe it doesn’t. And either way, it’s all okay.      

If there’s anything that Candace Bushnell’s characters have taught us it’s that love of self and friends and life is the greatest pursuit of all.

apartment, feng shui, good fortune, love, luck, wishes

Shifting energies

Christa Avampato

Some days New York beats the hell out of the best of us. Like a job, no matter how much we love it, it can’t love us back. I got a parking ticket (unfairly I might add – so I’m fighting it), I had a hard time getting around the city for a work project due to construction (which seems to be happening in every neighborhood), the wind was blowing so hard my lungs hurt walking outside, and then I got booted off a subway due to a suspicious package and once I walked to a new train station, a racial fight broke out in the car I was in (right next to me). And this all happened in one day.

I ate dinner with my friend, Brooke, and we talked about energies that seem to be shifting in the world. Sensing that something is happening in the world that is signaling change. Big change, and not bad change. Just a movement, something new on the horizon. Brooke is feng shui-ing her apartment. I have a Dummies guide to the art and though it sits on my bookshelf, I have not once picked it up to help with my current apartment even though my sleep cycles and energies have been completely knocked off kilter. 
Yesterday I started working on the corner of my place that deals with relationships. Previously, I had my junk box there. A recycled cardboard box decorated with some lovely wrapping paper. And in that box I would put all the stuff I couldn’t find another place for, and eventually it became a place that I put all kinds of things that I didn’t want to find a home for at the moment. A dumping ground. My love life. Brooke looked at me with something akin to horror. “You need to fix that.”
So I did. We can’t always force circumstances in our lives; it could be argued that we can never force circumstances in our lives. Rather than pounding the pavement and fighting for what we want, sometimes we need to prepare ourselves and call good fortune to our door. Now I just hope that good fortune is listening.     

job, love, work, writing

Writing for Life

Christa Avampato

“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
—Gloria Steinem,American journalist

This quote warms my heart. Countless times I am in the process of doing something and thinking about doing 5 other things that maybe I should be doing instead. I used to believe that this was a neurotic impulse, that my multi-tasking has crossed over from a necessity of high productivity to a bonafide illness. Now I know that’s not true – it’s just that I preferred to be writing.

For some people a looming paper brings stress and discomfort. For me, it’s always generated a sense of calm and well-being. It makes me feel productive and alive. It makes me feel that “all of this” is worth it once I can put it into my writing or into a story. And it shows me the importance of doing something you love, and how that activity can rewire your behavior and thought patterns.

I’ve heard some people say that making a job out of doing what you love ruins that love. I disagree – I can’t imagine how anyone gets though the work day doing something they dislike or “don’t really mind” when all the while they’d prefer to be doing something else. What more in life could you ask for than to spend your time doing what you love best?

Cuba, love, politics, travel

Dreaming of Cuba

Christa Avampato

I’ve been in love with Cuba since watching the movie For Love or Country with Andy Garcia. The white sand beaches, the music, the food, the art, and the language. I considered hopping over the border and entering illegally though after my South Africa passport debacle, I don’t think that would be wise. Instead, I have been waiting for Mr. Castro to pass on or step down as the US government has made it abundantly clear that they will not lift the ban on Americans traveling to Cuba with him in power.

And he has stepped down. Though his brother has assumed power, it seems that change may be afoot on that small island only 90 miles from Miami. In my lifetime, I may get to sink my feet into that white sand, take in the music and the art, drink my authentic Cuban coffee with my authentic Cuban sandwich, and drown in the beauty of the language and the people who have so long been isolated from us. 
One can only hope that love and country no longer have to be mutually exclusive.      
The above photo can be found at: http://www.vjv.co.uk:.webloc.