The Pitfalls of an English Degree

I'm now convinced that going to college has made it damn near impossible for me to communicate with anyone who isn't a native English speaker. After four years of dealing with professors and academic articles, I now have to try and simplify my speech as much as possible. I never realized how much of day-to-day speech is made up of metaphors, euphemisms or sayings. How to explain how you "spend time"? Or how do you save a conversation after you've derailed it by accidentally using the word "theorist"?

As if an over-active vocabulary weren't enough to deal with, I also talk too fast. While we were out to dinner with a mixed group, Katie Beth and I wound up talking about a book she was reading that deals with Vlad the Impaler, and the word "vampire" came up more than once. She turned to a Taiwanese guy sitting with us and asked if he was able to follow what we were saying and he replied, "Yeah, you were saying you don't eat spicy food."

So, I'm going to choose to blame the piles of textbooks and novels that I allegedly read for my classes. After all that time trying to sound smart, I finally just backslid into gibberish. Because when it boils down to it, studying literature is no help when you're trying to explain the difference between a chili pepper and a "blood-suck-ghost."