playfulness

What I have missed in medical school was the sense of playfulness - and to be frank, I let medical school and life grind down my curiosity and love of learning, although hopefully it was just submerged for a while and not permanently damaged.

Medical students tend to work ridiculously hard; drink a lot of alcohol and party hard (and I am totally stereotyping - I have friends that aren't like that); take mental and emotional abuse in the hospital and say, "Yes sir, thank you sir," or "Yes, ma'am!"; and get used to just not having fun, not having a life, being the bottom of the totem pole, etc.  It helps if you don't mind just lying down and taking it for a couple years during the course of your training.  This is a long way to say, med students tend not to be very playful because there is far too much work to do in the first place.   There isn't a culture of just solving a problem for the fun of it... and.... well, no corny math jokes.

So the grad student teaching linear algebra made some really terrible math jokes, which he had to explain because none of us could follow them, and then digressed into hierarchies of infinity (which I didn't fully follow, but it was still lovely and mind-blowing).  But it made me happy because it's been at least TWO YEARS since my last math joke!