The duality of mathematical motivation perfectly captured! When you're exploring math for personal curiosity, you're basically SpongeBob—bright-eyed, excited, sitting comfortably in your mental armchair ready to absorb knowledge like a... well, sponge. But the MOMENT it becomes a mandatory assignment with deadlines? Your brain transforms into that horrifying, traumatized SpongeBob variant that's seen things no cartoon character should ever witness. Suddenly those elegant probability distributions aren't fascinating patterns—they're instruments of torture designed by sadistic professors who clearly never needed sleep in their lives. The mathematical universe didn't change; just the context of your relationship with it. Nothing destroys the beauty of a Poisson distribution quite like "This will be 40% of your final grade."