Okay. I have been talking about Costa Rica with many people via email and AIM and don't particularly want to repeat the same details over and over. Here, therefore, is an excerpt from an email:

The summer went really fast, but I was glad to be back in the
USA after a month of having everyone speak Spanish! Plus, I was really
sick of rice and beans. Aside from that, though, Costa Rica was
definitely an awesome experience. We hiked in the rain forest and I
did a zip-line in the canopy and went white water rafting for the
first time, we went horseback riding and kayaking in the Pacific and
swam in the ocean and I learned how to make a pina colada if I was
stranded on a desert island with only coconuts and pineapples. (: We
also soaked in natural hot springs and walked under waterfalls and saw
boiling mud at the foot of a volcano. The group narrowly escaped being
urinated on by Howler Monkeys and found poison dart frogs (which, by
the way, cause you to hallucinate if you lick them) and toucans and a
big, hairy tarantula. I saw coffee being grown and ate sugarcane and
held a snake. Plus, my family was really nice. It was just a little
weird, not really speaking the language. And I really missed everyone!

Back from Chautauqua and my dad's house in Binghamton. Both were fun. Saw some people from Chtq. in the city a few days ago. I'm going to start a new xanga for Andover soon. Any ideas for a name, everybody? I'm thinking corabelle, which is what some of my friends call me at Chtq. And what color should the background be... Hmmm.

I saw Cinderella Man yesterday. I was surprised. It's not that I expected it to be bad, exactly, I just never got that excited about watching a bunch of guys with oversized red fists attack one another. I thought it might be a little boring or a little too violent for me, but I still wanted to see it.. because who wouldn't want to see Russell Crowe and Renee Zellwegger (sp?) together. It turned out to be a very well done picture. (hee hee, I feel very quaint saying picture) I was on the edge of my seat for some of the fights, even if I did flinch every time either boxer was hit. Through the entire movie, I was imagining Russell Crowe as I saw him in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, which is certainly not a bad way to see him, but still.

Speaking of Russell Crowe, apparently he was arrested yesterday for assault and possession of a weapon, or something along those lines. The weapon? A phone. I'm not even kidding. He was in NY, a hotel in SoHo, trying to call his wife in Australia (which, btw, is very sweet) and the call wasn't going through or some such trouble. He became agitated, and eventually threw the phone at one of the hotel workers. The guy was okay, but Russell was cuffed. Ok, not so funny. But a phone!? Come on. Anyway, all publicity is good publicity, right? And it did mention his new movie more than once in the article. This was almost definnitely not staged, I'm just pointing it out. Who knows? Maybe more people will go see his movie, having heard about it in this rather unusual way. I wonder if he ever got to speak to his wife, after all that..

Hmm. That is somewhat thought provoking, in a bad way. Why is it I am able to recount to you.. and choose to, no less... all the details of one celebrity's scandalous business with a telephone, but I am sort of hazy on the particulars of the reason the stadium won't be built. I guess it's a good thing I know that work on the stadium stopped at all (I'm very happy about that, incidentally. It means the West Side won't be invaded and it means NY will probably not host the summer olympics in 2012. That would have been a hot and crowded nightmare. Talk about traffic.), but I think my.. and maybe people's in general.. knowledge of current events is sort of misplaced. I bet more people know about the phone incident than the stadium. Why is it that we are more likely to read about a completely inconsequential guy who happened to be in a movie than about issues that affect our city or our nation or the world. And are we all really uninformed? Is it by choice?

Finally, I am packing for Spain. It is a long and arduous, but wonderful process, because it means I am that much closer to the trip. I can't believe it's tomorrow!! Must do laundry and buy batteries for the digital camera.