Thursday
nights are like Paris. Paris is an adjective, verb, abstract noun for me. Here it stands for the physical place with its grand beauty but also for the feeling I read from it. The interpretation I take on its light and luxury of culture is that it's a lucky, lovely thing to be human, me, nineteen. Thursday nights evoke those thoughts. I get giddy and glorious, listen louder, and speak when I never would. Sometimes my form trembles when talk, but it's rarer now. I hold my own in debate. I don't hold leaves of paper to shake in the wind of worry. Thursdays are a spike in my week. I rise at a high rate. Like an excited neuron, I fire bursts of electrical activity. Ions of ideas flow in and provoke further depolarization, destabilization of set levels of opinions. Running around barefoot, I am at home, enclosed, exposed at once. It's my sabbath day in a night, separated from the rest of the week by its own ceremonies of candle lighting and havdalah.
A voltage clamp is a device invented to control a cell by keeping it at a constant voltage, a constant separation of charge across the membrane. When current flows into or out of a neuron, the voltage clamp responds immediately by balancing that current with an equal and opposite one, a force comforting as Newton's third law of motion. The clamp's opposing current impedes the neuron from its normal exponential voltage change. Even if above threshold, the neuron won't fire an action potential. It won't go through the phases of depolarization, repolarization and hyperpolarization where the membrane potential quickly rises, falls back, then sinks below its original level. Instead, it establishes equilibrium wherever willed. Sometimes I wish someone would hold me in voltage clamp. Although I'd miss out on all the intensifications and expansions that come with a rise in temperature or potential, I'd maintain equilibrium. I wouldn't soar before, after, during St. A's, wouldn't laugh uncontrollably at Friday night movie bathroom humor. I wouldn't cry when critiqued. To stop being this easily excitable membrane, reacting to smallest stimuli, might be a relief. But losing the peaks, the Paris defeats the point of living except in a laboratory.
A voltage clamp is a device invented to control a cell by keeping it at a constant voltage, a constant separation of charge across the membrane. When current flows into or out of a neuron, the voltage clamp responds immediately by balancing that current with an equal and opposite one, a force comforting as Newton's third law of motion. The clamp's opposing current impedes the neuron from its normal exponential voltage change. Even if above threshold, the neuron won't fire an action potential. It won't go through the phases of depolarization, repolarization and hyperpolarization where the membrane potential quickly rises, falls back, then sinks below its original level. Instead, it establishes equilibrium wherever willed. Sometimes I wish someone would hold me in voltage clamp. Although I'd miss out on all the intensifications and expansions that come with a rise in temperature or potential, I'd maintain equilibrium. I wouldn't soar before, after, during St. A's, wouldn't laugh uncontrollably at Friday night movie bathroom humor. I wouldn't cry when critiqued. To stop being this easily excitable membrane, reacting to smallest stimuli, might be a relief. But losing the peaks, the Paris defeats the point of living except in a laboratory.
