Come si dice "Excited"?

My favorite story to tell about my best friend, Allison, is about her “first word” when she was learning how to talk. It is quite possibly the funniest “first word” I have ever heard. Instead of “momma” or “dada”, Allison pointed at a photograph of a kitty-cat and joyful proclaimed, “Titty”. The obvious connotation of this word makes it remarkable that it would come out of a 1 year-olds mouth!
I find it quite similar to learning a second language. If you must crawl before you can walk, I am defiantly attempting to walk! Now that I have begun to connect the dots in Italian, I enjoy looking up new verbs. I then write them down in my notepad (which I consistently carry) and find opportune times to try them out. If you don’t have “verbi”, it is hard to have an interesting conversation in any language.
Tonight, I went to visit my friends, Sara and Miro, who work at the Goblin Gelateria. I love talking with them because my Italian is better than their English. I have discovered that this is the key to learning Italian. I am forced try and speak, even if I fall flat on my face- as was the case tonight. I exhausted all my urban Italian vocabulary in about ten minutes worth of conversation, but was not afraid to make a few linguistic errors. In Italian, I told Sara that my American friends and I were looking to meet more Italian friends in Sansepolcro. She explained to me that the gelateria closes in October. Then, Miro and she would not have to work and will be able to spend time with us. I wanted to express just how excited I was about this possibility. Fortunately, I had just looked up the word for “excite” in my dictionary yesterday and had written it down in on my notepad. “Sono Eccitare,” I exclaim! The shire shock on Miro’s face told me immediately that I said the wrong thing. And by the laughter in the gelateria, I inferred quickly what this really meant. IN order to make sure I understood, Sara says, “Bello Ragazzo”, “troppo vino”, “Eccitare”! I was quickly rebuked back to crawling in Italian! If you still do not understand what this means and are curious, please ask me. Because of my wide audience range, I will save the slang for the curious select. In any case, although it is defiantly is not what I meant, I realize now that I love making mistakes. You can learn some pretty funny things about cultural and linguistic relations. There are words in English that also have double meanings. “Obviously”, this just gives me more reason to laugh at my Italian friends when they make errors in English. Isn’t that right, Hercules?!