Absorption…

…coefficients can be determined by multiplying the measured absorbance of your sample at each wavelength by 2.303 (which comes from a log transformation) and dividing by your pathlength, which is usually 0.0100 m (1.00 cm)…

Right. Sorry. Wrong kind of absorption.

So I went out for coffee and sno-cones last night with this guy, who I shall call the Cool CS Guy for a lack of imagination, and we’re talking, as most people tend to do when sitting down and drinking chai, and I had a small epiphany about myself: much of the extent of my more pleasant social interactions involve what I’m [now] terming “absorption”.

When I meet people that are different, I want to absorb them. I want to know what their quirks are, and then I want to know enough to be able to derive how the quirks develop–history, personality, everything. And since these are constantly changing over time, I never tire of this process. I want to know people as well as I know myself (or as close as I can possibly get), and the only thing that frustrates or deters me are people that clam up.

I’ve done this time and time again over the years, with all of my current friends and many of my “enemies”. Even when/if things go awry eventually, since personalities (particularly when mine is in the mix) do clash, I’ve still had the benefit of the experience of some absorption of their personality, which makes the whole thing worth it.

Conversation to fill silence annoys me, and makes me wonder about the speaker’s dislike/fear of silence. People that must comment on everything from every single car on the road to each little sound they hear to all the small-talking conversations they had that day irk me. I figure I just lack the skill to extract the meaningful background information from such chatter, and I until I learn, I just suffer in silence or with the occassional grunt to show I am still conscious.

In fact, I’ve found I get pretty damned stressed and bitchy when social interactions are limited to the above less pleasant types, which has been something I’ve been struggling with since my return to Terre Haute. It’s something that keeps me locked in my room and silent rather than engaging in idle chit-chat, or running out to spend time with Bob, Luke (despite the fact that I put Luke into the frustrating “clam up” category much of the time), or, quite possibly, the Cool CS Guy (if we keep hanging out).

So ends my small epiphany, of which the only thing really epiphanic was the high contrast between the pleasure derived from each category of interaction.