Earthlink Cable → Earthlink and Counter-strike

for some reason, i ping high 60's to lower 70's on almost all the server in Counter-strike. my friend in florida gets lower 40's in a texas servwer while i get high 60's. is there something i can do to lower my ping?

no, not really, this is mostly due to "backbone" issues on the internet that your connection to the server routes to. A good example is the euro's in sweden they play with 20ping, its not becuase they have a lot of bandwidth on the client side, its becuase they have good backbones. Try doing a tracert to the ip to a server where your pinging high too and see where the largest hop is. Do a couple of them so you get a better idea of where you have the problem, like on which backbone.