You know all that crap that your guidance counselor and your parents fed you about finding a career that would pay you for doing what you wanted to do anyway? I used to listen to that and snort. There wasn't much that I actually wanted to do. When I was programming, I used to evaluate my days based on whether or not I had accumulated more stress than I'd released. Being relieved--that I'd met a deadline, that a product had shipped, that a manager hadn't yelled at me--was the closest that I came to enjoying my day.

I've felt more or less the same about my studies since returning to school. I am relieved when I do well on tests and papers, but the actual process of studying and writing about this stuff is mostly drudgery.

Until this semester, and in particular, my linear algebra class.

Yesterday the teacher didn't show. No note. After twenty minutes or so, most of the class left. But a few of us stayed to talk about some of the problems from the homework. I started writing out some of my solutions on the board, and in response to another student's questions, I began to expand upon and explore the ideas behind the problems. "Let me see if I can prove this theorem over the field of complex numbers too," I said, and started to write. When I finished with that, I tried to explain some problems on weighted inner product spaces to a couple of other students. And in the middle of my explanation, it hit me with perfect clarity that I could do this for the rest of my life, that I would be perfectly happy to talk about these silly, abstract, trivial results forever, even if nobody paid me to do it. And I looked in the faces of the other students in the room, feeling simultaneously grateful that they were listening to me and very sad that at some point or another, they were going to wander out of the room, and I'd have to wait for another day, another chance to talk to other people about the most interesting ideas in the world.

I'm studying right now for a test in this class, and it's so much fun that I feel like I'm cheating, somehow, like I'm getting away with something by playing around with linear algebra and calling it studying. I can't believe I got to be thirty-one years old before I figured out how much fun this stuff was. I am so grateful that I didn't have to wait longer.