Brace yourself: I'm about to criticize Dunkin.

I have a distinct tendency to get sick after final exams. The timing has ranged from a raging headache coming on during a molecular biology final, which led to some answers about molecular cloning that probably would’ve been a medical ethics violation, to spiking a fever in the Dallas airport while waiting for a connecting flight, but it’s been a constant throughout my college years: adrenaline-fueled week followed by an adrenaline crash, resulting in a totally sidelined semi-human. So completely predictably, I got home on Friday from my first week of co-op, lay down on my bed, and within a few hours was feverish and coughing my lungs out.

A reminder: when you’re talking to someone who learned English in a different country than you, think hard before you use slang or figures of speech that might seem obvious to you. Objectively speaking, the phrase “my roommate picked up a bug in a hostel and gave it to me”? Not all that clear. Actually a little alarming. Another phrase that’s caused confusion in a house with a Minnesotan roommate, a Dutch, and a Chilean: the rotary half a mile from our house, which can come up in daily conversation because it gives a great morning dose of “oh God, this is how I die” on the bike ride to the university. In some places in the U.S. it’s a roundabout; in some places it’s a traffic circle; in our house, it’s “the thing with all the cars” and then some vague hand gestures. Another puzzling, albeit less dangerous, part of the morning commute? A sign at a gas station advertising Seattle’s Best Coffee, which I drank all through high school on the West Coast and missed desperately when I came to Boston (read: I’m on a one-person boycott mission of Dunkin. There is no Dunkin where I come from—which, incidentally, is another phrase, like ‘traffic circle,’ that lifelong East Coasters don’t seem to fully grasp).  

Hopefully once I’m a fully functioning person again, these updates will get more interesting. For now I’ll tell you that one of Ireland’s most popular drinks is carbonated lemon-orange juice, which is everything I didn’t know I needed when I was sick, and that cough drops here are more than just artificial honey flavor in lozenge form, so you really can’t pop them like Halls. It took a few hours of being woozy out of my mind on cough medicine, and an admonition from my European roommate, before I realized what was going on. Next week I should be more alive-awake-alert-enthusiastic and ready to start taking on Ireland for real; right now, I’m gonna take another nap.