The Hiding Place, part 4

“Ja! Herrein!” called a man's voice.

The guard pushed open the door, gave a straight-armed salute and marched smartly off. The man wore a gun in a leather holster and a beribboned uniform. He removed his hat and I was stark staring into the face of the gentle-mannered man who had visited me in my cell.

“I am Lieutenant Rahms,” he said, stepping to the door to close it behind me. “You're shivering! Here, let me get a fire going.”

He filled a pot-bellied stove from a small coal scuttle, for all the world a kindly German householder entertaining a guest. What if this were all a subtle trap? This kind, human manner-perhaps he had simply found it more effective than brutality in tricking the l truth from affection-starved people. Oh Lord, let no weak gullibility on my part endanger another's life.

“I hope,” the officer was saying, “we won't have many more days this spring as cold as this one.” He drew out a chair for me to sit on.

Warily I accepted it. How strange after three months, to feel chair-back behind me, chair-arms for my hands! The heat from the stove was quickly warming the little room. In spite of myself, I began to relax. I ventured a timid comment about the tulips: “So tall, they must have been beautiful.”

“Oh they were!” he seemed ridiculously pleased. “The best I've ever grown. At home we always have Dutch bulbs.”

We talked about flowers for a while and then he said, “I would like to help you, Miss ten Boom. But you must tell me everything. I may be able to do something, but only if you do not hide anything from me.”

So there it was already. All the friendliness, the kindly concern that I had half-believed in-all a device to elicit information. Well, why not? This man was a professional with a job to do. But I, too, in a small way, was a professional.

For an hour he questioned me, using every psychological trick that the young men of our group had drilled me in. In fact, I felt like a student who has crammed for a difficult exam and then is tested on only the most elementary material. It soon became clear that they believed the Beje had been a headquarters for raids on food ration offices around the country. Of all the illegal activities I had on my conscience this was probably the one I knew least about. Other than receiving the stolen cards each month and passing them on, I knew no details of the operation. Apparently my real ignorance began to show after a while Lieutenant Rahms stopped making notes of my hopelessly stupid answers.

“Your other activities, Miss ten Boom. What would you like to tell me about them?” “Other activities? Oh, you mean-you want to know about my church for mentally retarded people!” And I plunged into an eager account of my efforts at preaching to the feeble-minded.

The lieutenant's eyebrows rose higher and higher. “What a waste of time and energy!” he exploded at last. “If you want converts, surely one normal person is worth all the half-wits in the world!' I stared into the man's intelligent blue-gray eyes: true National- Socialist philosophy, I thought, tulip bed or no. And then to my astonishment I heard my own voice saying boldly, “May I tell you the truth, Lieutenant Rahms?” “This hearing, Miss ten Boom, is predicated on the assumption that you will do me that honor.”

“The truth, sir,” I said, swallowing, “is that God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours-so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things.”

I knew it was madness to talk this way to a Nazi officer. But he said nothing so I plunged ahead. “In the Bible I learned that God values us not for our strength or our brains but simply because He has made us. Who knows, in His eyes a half-wit may be worth more than a watchmaker. Or---a lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Rahms stood up abruptly. “That will be all for today.”

He walked swiftly to the door. “Guard!” I heard footsteps on the gravel path.

“The prisoner will return to her cell.”

From The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom, pp. 172-173.

Gossip! Gossip!

I don't watch a whole lot of TV, and I'm frequently encouraged that I made the right choice.

Here's a couple posts elsewhere on the enternet on the CW series Gossip Girls (along with an account of peculiar locker room hazing).

From Rod Dreher, the man with the awesome beard.

From James Poulos, the man with awesome sideburns.

Also, read the comments on Dreher's blog for bonus enlightenment/controversy. And y'all are free to post here any comments you like.

PS. Here's a question for you to answer on the comment boxes: did you find this helpful, in some way? Thanks!

Oden: the Saga continues

Greg Oden played the piano at the Espy's for Justin Timberlake. He even wore glasses a la Elton John. Enjoy.

The Pride of Columbus

Greg Oden and Jim Tressel: awesome people.

Oden on hosting the Espys, or "The Math Does Not Lie":

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Oden at the Espys and back in classes:

Tressel is French for awesome:

Enjoy.

Thanks to:

Men of the Scarlet and Gray

Eleven Warriors

The Hiding Place, part 3

Betsie poured a bowl of the soup she had cooked for supper from a much-boiled bone. The baby began a thin high wail; I rocked it while the mother ate. Here was a new danger, a tiny fugitive too young to know the folly of making a noise. We had had many Jewish children over a night or several nights at the Beje and even the youngest had developed the uncanny silence of small hunted things. But at two weeks this one had yet to discover how unwelcoming was its world: we would need a place for them far removed from other houses.

And the very next morning into the shop walked the perfect solution. He was a clergyman friend of ours, pastor in a small town outside of Haarlem, and his home was set back from the street in a large wooded park.

“Good morning, pastor,” I said, the pieces of the puzzle falling together in my mind. “Can we help you?” I looked at the watch he had brought in for repair. It required a very hard-to-find spare part. “But for you, Pastor, we will do our very best. And now I have something I want to confess.”
The pastor's eyes clouded. “Confess?” I drew him out of the back door of the shop and up the stairs to the dining room.

“I confess that I too am searching for something.” The pastor's face was now wrinkled with a frown. “Would you be willing to take a Jewish mother and her baby into your home? They will almost certainly be arrested otherwise.”

Color drained from the man's face. He took a step back from me.

“Miss ten Boom! I do hope you're not involved with any of this illegal concealment and undercover business. It's just not safe! Think of your father! And your sister-she's never been strong!” On impulse I told the pastor to wait and ran upstairs. Betsie had put the newcomers in Willem's old room, the farthest from windows on the street. I asked the mother's permission to borrow the infant: the little thing weighed hardly anything in my arms.

Back in the dining room, I pulled back the coverlet from the baby's face. There was a long silence. The man bent forward, his hand in spite of himself reaching for the tiny fist curled around the blanket. For a moment I saw compassion and fear struggle in his face. Then he straightened. “No. Definitely not. We could lose our lives for that Jewish child!” Unseen by either of us, Father had appeared in the doorway.

“Give the child to me, Corrie,” he said.

Father held the baby close, his white beard brushed its cheek, looking into the little face with eyes as blue and innocent as the baby's own. At last he looked up at the pastor. “You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.”

The pastor turned sharply on his heels and walked out of the room. So we had to accept a bad solution to our problem. On the edge of Haarlem was a truck farm that hid refugees for short periods of time. It was not a good location, since the Gestapo had been there already. But there was nowhere else available on short notice. Two workers took the woman and child there that afternoon.

A few weeks later we heard that the farm had been raided. When the Gestapo came to the barn where the woman was hidden, not the baby but the mother began to shriek with hysteria. She, the baby, and her protectors were all taken.

We never learned what happened to them.

From The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom, pp 114-115.

The Hiding Place, part 2

And while Haarlem and the rest of Holland strolled and bowed and swept its steps, the neighbors on our east geared for war. We knew what was happening—there was no way to keep from knowing. Often in the evening, turning the dial on the radio, we would pick up a voice from Germany. The voice did not talk, or even shout. It screamed. Oddly, it was even –tempered Betsie who reacted most strongly, hurtling from her chair and flinging herself at the radio to shut off the sound.

And yet, in the interludes, we forgot. Or, when Willem was visiting and would not let us forget, or when letters from Jewish suppliers in Germany came back marked “Address Unknown,” we still managed to believe that it was primarily a German problem. “How long are they going to stand for it,” we said. “They won’t put up with that man for long.”

Only once did that changes taking place in Germany reach inside the little shop on the Barteljorisstraat, and that was in the person of a young German watchmaker. Germans frequently came to work under Father for a while, for his reputation reached even beyond Holland. So when this tall good-looking young man appeared with his apprentice papers from a good firm in Berlin, Father hired him without hesitation. Otto told us proudly that he belonged to the Hitler Youth. Indeed it was a puzzle to us why he had come to Holland, for he found nothing but fault with Dutch people and products. “The world we see what Germans can do,” he said often.
His first morning at work he came upstairs for coffee and Bible reading with the other employees; after that he sat alone down in the shop. When we asked him why, he said that though he had not understood the Dutch words, he had seen that Father was reading from the Old Testament which, as he informed us, was the Jews’ “Book of Lies.”

I was shocked but Father was only sorrowful. “He has been taught wrong,” he told me. “By watching us, seeing that we love this Book and are truthful people, he will realize his error.”

It was several weeks later that Betsie opened the door from the hallway and beckoned to Father and me. Upstairs on Tante Jan’s tall mahogany chair sat the lady who ran the rooming house where Otto lived. Changing the bed sheets that morning, she said, she had found something under his pillow. And she drew from her market satchel a knife with a curving ten-inch blade.
Again, Father put the best interpretation on it. “The boy is probably only frightened, alone in a strange country. He probably bought it to protect himself.”

It was true enough that Otto was alone. He spoke no Dutch nor made any effort to learn, and besides Father, Betsie and me, few people in this working-class part of the city spoke German. We repeated our invitation to join us upstairs in the evenings, but whether he did not care for our choice of radio programs, or because the evening ended as the morning began, with prayer and Bible readings, he seldom did.

In the end, father did fire Otto—the first employee he had ever discharged in more than sixty years in business. And it was not the knife or anti-Semitism that finally brought it about, but Otto’s treatment of the old clockmender, Christoffels.

From the very first I had been baffled by his brusqueness with the old man. It wasn’t anything he did—not in our presence anyway—but by what he didn’t do. No standing back to let the older man go first, no helping on with a coat, no picking up a dropped tool. It was hard to pin down. One Sunday, when Father, Betsie and I were having dinner in Hilversum, I commented on what I thought was simple thoughtlessness.

Willem shook his head. “It’s very deliberate,” he said. “It’s because the Christoffels is old. The old have no value to the State. They’re also much harder to train in the new ways of thinking. Germany is systematically teaching disrespect for old age.”

We stared at him, trying hard to grasp such a concept. “Surely you are mistaken, Willem!” Father said. “Otto is extremely courteous to me—unusually so. And I’m a good deal older than Christoffels.”

“You’re different. You’re the boss. That’s another part of the system: respect for authority. It’s the old and weak who are to be eliminated.”

We rode the train home in stunned silence—and we started watching Otto more closely. But how could we know, how in the Holland of 1939 could we have guessed, that it was not in the shops we could observe him but in the streets and alleys outside that Otto was subjecting Christoffels to a very real, small persecution. “Accidental” collisions and trippings, a shove, a heel ground into a toe, were making the old clockman’s journeys to and from work times of terror.

The erect and shabby little man was too proud to report any of this to us. It was not until the icy February morning that Christoffels stumbled into the dining room with a bleeding cheek and a torn coat that the truth came out. Even then, Christoffels said nothing.

But running down the street to pick up his hat, I encountered Otto surrounded by an indignant little cluster of people who had seen what happened. Rounding the corner into the alley, the young man had deliberately forced the older one into the side of the building and ground his face against the rough bricks.

Father tried to reason with Otto as he let him go, to show him why such behavior was wrong. Otto did not answer. In silence he collected the few tools he had brought with him and in silence left the shop. It was only at the door that he turned to look at us, a look of the most utter contempt I had ever seen.

From The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom. Pp. 74-76.

The Hiding Place, pt. 1

I’ve been thinking that it would be wise to share with you passages from books I’ve read, as humanity has passed down to us far too rich a heritage to ignore. Thus, I’ll begin with several passages from Corrie ten Boom’s World War II memoirs of supporting the Dutch Underground, hiding Jews clandestinely in her home, and imprisonment in the camp at Ravensbruck. Her book is The Hiding Place.

***

I was standing on a chair washing the big window in the dining room, waving now and then to passersby in the alley, while in the kitchen Mama peeled potatoes for lunch. It was 1918; the dreadful war was finally over: even in the way people walked you could sense a new hope in the air.

It wasn't like Mama, I thought, to let the water keep running that way; she never wasted anything.

“Corrie.”

Her voice was low, almost a whisper.

“Yes mama?”

“Corrie,” she said again.

And then I heard the water spilling out of the sink onto the floor.

I jumped down from the chair and ran into the kitchen. Mama stood with her hand on the faucet, staring strangely at me while the water splashed from the sink over her feet.

“What is it, Mama?” I cried, reaching for the faucet. I pried her fingers loose, shut off the water, and drew her away from the puddle on the floor.

“Corrie,” she said again.

“Mama, you're ill! We've got to get you to bed!”

“Corrie.”

I put an arm beneath her shoulder and guided her through the dining room and up the stairs. At my cry Tante Anna came running down the stairs and caught Mama's other arm. Together we got her onto her bed and then I raced down to the shop for Father and Betsie.

For an hour the four of us watched the effect of the cerebral hemorrhage spread slowly over her body. The paralysis seemed to effect her hands first, traveling from them along her arms and then flown into her legs. Dr. van Veen, for whom the apprentice had gone running, could do no more than we.

Mama's consciousness was the last thing to go, her eyes remaining open and alert, looking lovingly at each one of us until very slowly they closed and we were sure she was gone forever. Dr. van Veen, however said that this was only a coma, very deep, from which she could slip either into death or back to life.

For two months Mama lay unconscious on that bed, the five of us with Nollie on the evening shift, taking turns at her side. And then one morning, as unexpectedly as the stroke had come, her eyes opened and she looked around her. Eventually she regained the use of her arms and legs enough to be able to move about with assistance, though her hands would never again hold her crochet hook or knitting needles.

We moved her out of the tiny bedroom facing the brick wall, blown to Tante Jans's front room where she could watch the busy life of the Barteljorisstraat. Her mind, it was soon clear, was as active as ever, but the power of speech did not return-with the exception of three words. Mama could say “yes,” “no “ and-perhaps because it was the last one she had pronounced-”Corrie.” And so Mama called everybody “Corrie.”

To communicate, she and I invented a little game, something like Twenty Questions. “Corrie,” she would say.

“What is it, Mama? You're thinking of someone!”

“Yes.”

“Someone in the family.”

“No.”

“Somebody you saw on the street?”

“Yes”

“Was it an old friend'?”

“Yes”

“A man?”

“No.”

A woman Mama had known for a long time. “Mama, I'll bet it's someone's birthday!” And I would call out names until I heard her delighted, “Yes!” Then I would write a little note saying that Mama had seen the person and wished her a happy birthday. At the close I always put the pen in her stiffened fingers so she could sign it. An angular scrawl was all that was left of her beautiful curling signature, but it was soon recognized and loved all over Haarlem.

It was astonishing, really, the quality of life she was able to lead in that crippled body, and watching her during the three years of her paralysis, I made another discovery about love.

Mama's love had always been the kind that acted itself out with soup pot and sewing basket. But now that these things were taken away, the love seemed as whole as before. She sat in her chair at the window and loved us. She loved the people she saw in the street-and beyond: her love took in the city, the land of Holland, the world.

And so l learned that love is larger than the wails that shut it in.

More and more often, Nollie's conversation at the dinner table had been about a young fellow teacher at the school where she taught, Flip van Woerden. By the time Mr. van Woerden paid the formal call on Father, Father had rehearsed and polished his little speech of blessing a dozen times.

The night before the wedding, as Betsie and I lifted her into bed Mama suddenly burst into tears. With Twenty Questions we discovered that no, she was not unhappy about the marriage; yes, she liked Flip very much. It was that the solemn mother-daughter talk promised over the years for this night, the entire sex education which our taciturn society provided, was now not possible.

In the end, that night, it was Tante Anna who mounted the stairs to Nollie's room, eyes wide and cheeks aflame. Years before, Nollie had moved from our room at the top of the stairs down to Tante Bep's little nook, and there she and Tante Anna were closeted for the prescriped half-hour. There could have been no one in all Holland less informed about marriage than Tante Anna, but this was ritual: the older woman counseling the younger one down through the centuries--one could no more have gotten married without it than one could have dispensed with the ring.

Nollie was radiant, the following day, in her long white dress. But it was Mama I could not take my eyes off. Dressed in black as always, she was nevertheless suddenly young and girlish, eyes sparkling with joy at this greatest occasion the ten Booms had ever held Betsie and I took her into the church early, and I was sure that most of the van Woerden family and friends never dreamed that the gracious and smiling lady in the first pew could neither walk alone nor speak.

It was not until Nollie and Flip came down the aisle together that I thought for the very first time of my own dreams of such a moment with Karel. I glanced at Betsie, sitting so tall and lovely on the other side of Mama. Betsie had always known that, because of her health, she could not have children, and for that reason had decided long ago never to marry. Now I was twenty-seven, Betsie in her mid-thirties, and I knew that this was the way it was going to be: Betsie and I the unmarried daughters living at home in the Beje.

It was a happy thought, not a sad one. And that was the moment when I knew for sure that God had accepted the faltering gift of my emotions made four years ago. For with the thought of Karel-all shining round with love as thoughts of him had been since I was fourteen---came not the slightest trace of hurt. “Bless Karel, Lord Jesus,” I murmured under my breath. “And bless her. Keep them close to one another and to You.” And that was a prayer, l knew for sure that could not have sprung unaided from Corrie ten Boom.

But the great miracle of the day came later. To close the service we had chosen Mama's favorite hymn, “Fairest Lord Jesus.” And now as I stood singing it I heard, behind me in the pew, Mama's voice singing too. Word after word, verse after verse, she joined in, Mama who could not speak four words, singing the beautiful lines without a stammer. Her voice which had been so high and clear was hoarse and cracked, but to me it was the voice of an angel.

All the way through she sang, while l stared straight ahead, not daring to turn around for fear of breaking the spell. When at last everyone sat down, Mama's eyes, Betsie's, and mine were brimming with tears.

At first we hoped it was the beginning of Mama’s recovery. But the words she had sung she was not able to say, nor did she ever sing again. It had been an isolated moment, a gift to us from God, His own very special wedding present. Four weeks later, asleep with a smile on her lips, Mama slipped away from us forever.

From The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom. Pp 62-66.

Incest and its Discontents

Here's something to wrap your mind around.

At Dreher's Crunch Con, read Incest is best for me.

A British academic writes about her relationship with her brother:

"Of course abuse happens, but it can happen in any sexual relationship and there's an expectation that a family member would never hurt you in the way that someone else could. There's no comparison between siblings close in age having sexual feelings and contact and an adult forcing a younger member of the family to do something they neither understand nor want to be involved in...I know this is meant to be wrong, but I've never felt anything so right."

The author then explains the tension occuring now that she and her brother have found other partners, but still keep a special place in their heart for each other.

Rod makes this killer point:

Here's my question, though: If God doesn't exist (that is, if there is no such thing as absolute moral truth), why shouldn't the woman have sex with her brother? They're careful not to risk reproduction, its always been consensual, they enjoy it, and they don't feel guilty. So what's the problem?

Ross Douthat responds:

I think this British essay making the case for incest being no big deal (the title, "I had sex with my brother but I don't feel guilty," more or less tells it) inadvertently makes a pretty good case for why incest is, in fact, a really bad idea - because it corrupts not only the siblings involved, but the lives of the people around them...

But this begs the question--what is corruption? Is it merely the manifestation of these feelings? It can't be that there has been some subtle weakening of a moral code or cultural order if those things are presumed to be social constructions. One might make an argument on purely pragmatic ground--namely, that childless incest creates a cultural precedent that would draw people from child-producing relationships, and, in the long run, contribute to population implosion and social decline. But if it's purely pragmatic, why the revulsion?

I remember in a philosophy class discussing what morality actually is. Some have argued that it's simply a gut-level, emotional response: I don't like that. And while I disagree, I think that when one forsakes both revelation and reason to define morality only in terms of personal preference, a visceral response is all that's left. Deny the soul, remove the head, and all that's left is guts.

Cause sometimes you hafta dance!

This is awesome...

It's neat to see so many of the beautiful places in the world...and fun people too. Of course, the indifferent guard at the Korea Demilitarized Zone shows it takes more than a peppy dance step to bring about brotherhood.

What the heck is a pleural effusion?

During my trip to Europe, my lovely host--and loyal blog reader--Sarah (she's An American in Paris and cooks a mean English-muffin sandwich) suggested that I write about my goings-on as a doctor-to-be amongst the fine pages of this blog. Hence, I shall do so, and I will try and use regular person words so, at the very least, you won’t think I’m as big a dork as I actually am. And you might even learn something.

So today I am shadowing at the Hematology/Oncology ward at my university. And I can see I already lost half of you, so:

Hematology = blood studies
Oncology = cancer studies

So Heme/Onc focuses mostly on blood-related cancers, such as leukemias, which are found primarily in bone marrow, but may migrate elsewhere in the blood to other organs, and lymphomas, which primarily involve lymph nodes, where your body has little store-houses of immune cells that fight off infections (they swell up during infections b/c cells there are rapidly multiplying to fight the invaders, so if you’re sick the doc will often feel under your neck to see if lymph nodes there are enlarged—quick and dirty check to see if you’re infected). Heme/Onc also deals with other blood-related conditions, too, such as sickle cell anemia, which one patient we saw today has.

In any case, today I got to help out with a thoracocentesis—don’t worry, I’ll define it in a sec. Tumors can cause many different secondary effects. We had a patient who developed a pleural effusion, which I’ll define in a sec also, but you first you need to know about your lungs. Your lungs are normally surrounded by membranes—thin layers of tissue, called the pleura. You can see them in this picture from Wikipedia—don’t worry, it’s public domain. The pleural membranes kind of make a balloon—the membranes are in blue, and the space within is in black. Your lungs (red) kind of fit into and are surrounded by the pleura on most sides.

Imagine punching a balloon with your fist, and having it spread all over your clenched hand. This is what the pleura do around the lungs—they cover most of the lung surface, except where the lungs connect to your windpipe and the blood vessels connect to the heart (your wrist punching the balloon). The space in between the layers of the pleura is squashed pretty small. Normally, it’s filled with fluid—about 15 ml, or half an ounce per lung. This allows the inside and outside layers of the pleura to slide across one another when you breathe, so your chest can expand and your lungs fill smoothly.

Sometimes too much fluid can go into the pleural space. This is a pleural effusion, and happened to our patient today as a result of his lymphoma. Here is an x-ray picture from Wikipedia by Clinical Cases that is much like the case I saw today. In both cases, the patients’ right lung (left side of x-ray) is normal—air looks black in x-rays. The left lung is almost completely cloudy due to fluid—not inside the lung, but inside the space around the lung.

Our patient had trouble breathing, so we performed a thoracocentesis. We had him lean over on a table near his bed, and the internist (sort of novice resident) carefully inserted a needle in between the ribs and into the pleural space—but not into the lung. The needle was hooked up to a syringe, which was used to withdraw fluid and pump it through a one-way valve into a bag. This took probably 15-20 minutes from start to finish. When the patient was leaned over with the internist behind him, this transpired:

Patient: “But what if I have to fart?”
Resident (internist’s advisor): “It’s ok, you can fart.”
Patient: “I know, but it would be awfully mean.”

I should note here the patient had two Percosets in the morning. It’s too bad these things don’t get written up in case reports. Then again… (and to think, I’ve been looking all over for “gas impermeable Mylar pantaloons.”)

We removed over 1000 ml of fluid. That's a quart, you metric-hatin' Yankees. And I got to hold the table the patient leaned on so it wouldn’t roll away. I am basically paying $30,000 a year to be a door-stopper. With a white coat. Living the dream.

Also, I know I've been bad about updating, but I'll try to do better. Promise! I know my Week of Being a Real Man turned into a Month of Being a Bum, and everyone's been pestering for the Official Finches and Sparrows Europe Experience, which I just might deliver to you, if I can decipher whatever I scribbled on that napkin at the train station in Munich. Witness the potential--posts on Wall-E; Blade Runner; biological perfectionism; the Louvre and the dying art world; German beers and Italian wines; why your photos are terrible; why my photos are only mediocre; more medical adventures; the long-awaited Weekend Blog round-up; peculiar cocktails you can't afford but wouldn't like anyway; novel art with novels; the best meal of my life; building a culture of heart and hands; the Holocaust; the Gospel according to Mark; T.S. Eliot, and the craziest Italian wedding that didn't involve the mafia (as far as I know).

Plus I might even redesign the blog layout itself, which, if I pull off, will be beautiful, but will require more Photoshop skills than I have, John James Audubon, a better understanding of CSS and XHTML, typographic vector art, a new blog host, and Scotch whisky. Maybe even a fountain pen. I told you it was crazy, and I'll probably just end up spilling liquor and ink all over my computer.

That being said, pray for me.

PS. John, that last inside joke was for you. If you didn't get it, I'm marching down the hall and smacking you.