a funny little story

Stuck in Traffic

By Seth Lesondak

Da5id didn’t particularly like the “Cleveland creative writing class.” His teacher, Mr. Eduardo, always lectured them in a strong Latino accent that none of the white kids could understand. Today was no exception. All Da5id caught of Mr. Eduardo’s lecture was: “Por escrito neccesito bueno punctuation. malo punctuation makes for malo escrito!” before he started to drift off, staring at, but not seeing, the obscene carvings in his desk.

          An hour later, thirty-two exhausted students formed a queue at the door.

          “Excelente work my students. You were all muy bueno chicos today. Hurry along to your next classe now and see you mañana!” said Mr. Eduardo. He stepped over an extension cord and flung open the door. A kid named Derek ran blindly out of it. Everybody else screamed. Derek had smashed into a car and died. There were not supposed to be cars in school, or trees, or roads for that matter. He quickly vanished from sight.

          “Dude,” shouted Da5id, “why the crap are we on a highway!?”

          “Yo no sey,” replied Mr. Eduardo, “But I think we can figure it out if we pay attention to the details!”

          “Dude, shut up,” responded Da5id.

          “No, De Verdad! Primera, we can assume that we are in some kind of vehículo, because we are moving, no? Segunda, we can assume that some idiot with muy poco brains pick up our mobile clase and put it on his vehículo, no? Which means we were all cleverly kidnapped by a burro, no?”

          “Oh,” said a nonplussed Da5id, “So now what we do?”

          “We must try to get free of course. The question is not que but como!”

          “Howsabout we’ all rock this classroom so it darn fall off the back of this heres truck,” said some kid named Steve Stevie Stephen Stevenson or SSSS. “Whatsabout y’all say to that thar idear huh?”

          “That is bueno idea SSSS! Let’s start rocking. Correr a la izquierda!” shouted Mr. Eduardo and everybody ran to the left. “And now to the dereche!” and everybody ran to the right. And on it went, left to right, right to left. After about fifteen minutes, the plan finally worked. Everybody toppled over off of the moving vehicle along with tons and tons of books, paper, pencils, pens and other random classroom crap.  

 

A personal essay

Beauty in a Small Place

My family has always kept me in close connection with nature; I enjoy nature to its fullest because of this. I take time to go for walks, to boat, and to go to the park. I raise animals, and work on a farm. Nature is my greatest and most open connection to the world.

            I started exploring the natural world at age three, with a ski trip to northern Wisconsin. It has become a tradition of family and friends since then and we still go today. We have become good friends with the owner of the cabin at which we stay, and I am a regular violin player at her small café. I appreciate that my first trip into wilderness happened to be the Wisconsin kind, full of brittle pine, ice and lots and lots of powdered sugar snow.

            Another outdoor tradition with my family and friends has been the annual trip to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It is a backpacking trip into the most untouched place of the Great Lake states. This place brings forth its beauty in the form of old growth forest and stunning sunsets that color the sky over the Lake Superior shoreline a dazzling series of pinks, purples and reds.

             Today, I took a trip to the shore of Lake Wingra. I made sure to take the time to look around and appreciate my surroundings. Still, I find it incredible that there could be such raw and untouched nature in such a small place as Madison, Wisconsin.

Microsoft Sucks

Freedom of Software

By Seth Lesondak

 

            I strongly believe that the future of software development must lie with open source software. “Why is that?” people ask. The fact is that proprietary software is simply unable to keep up with a fast-paced technological world due to its closed and single minded approach to program development. It is also accurate to state that many people are unhappy with the direction that proprietary software is going, most obvious in people’s reactions to the release of Windows Vista by the Microsoft Corporation.

            The process for open source software resembles that of writing a novel. First, a piece of software is coded in a universally standard programming language such as C++. Then, the piece of work, and the code that was used to write it, is placed on the internet. General computer users can download the software to use, and developers can download the source code for their own projects. Once a developer has the source code, they can edit it and repost it on the internet as a project of their own, and the process gets repeated, consistently improving the software to keep it ahead of the competition and up to date. With proprietary software, the whole improving process is skipped, leaving only an internally developed piece of software, which usually takes more time to develop and comes out less refined.

            Some people say that they do not use open source software because it is incompatible with hardware. Actually, many hardware companies are beginning to support open source, most notably IBM, who committed $1 billion dollars to developing hardware for open source software in 2001. Also, Dell is currently creating computers for a distribution of Linux called Ubuntu. Most incompatibility issues are, in fact, caused by the people who won’t use open source because of incompatibility issues. In fact, a lot of consumers use open source without even realizing it. For instance, 65 % of all web servers are Apache, a well known commercial open source project, and 14 % are Linux, the most well know and differentiated of the open source projects.

            The main proprietary software producer ever is the Microsoft Corporation, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. Both effectively treated the open source community as a joke. “There’s free software and then there’s open source,” Gates said once, while explaining that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. “There is this thing called the GPL (GNU Public License*[i]), which we disagree with.” He reasons that the open source license makes it “so that nobody can ever improve the software.” Anybody with and understanding of open source knows that the point of open source is to improve software. It is not as if Mr. Gates has bragging rights. Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista, has been dubbed, in effect, a huge and catastrophic flop. People hate Vista because it is hard to use, slow, bloated (containing unnecessary applications that slow it down), incompatible with hardware, and requires constant updates. This alone is enough to prove that proprietary software is not superior to or more compatible than open source.

            Proprietary software is failing. Every day it becomes more obvious, with the release of each new patch system patch and product. The alternative is here and I hope that people will see that it is better than Microsoft. Let us insert the patriotic idea of free speech into computer, an ever growing part of our lives.

 

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* This is the license on which open source is based. In effect, it states that if you download source code from an open source application and then develop another application based off of that source code, you must post your source code up for download. For more information and the entire contents of GPL go to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

Rebel Code by Glyn Moody © 2001, Perseus Publishing

Just Say NO to MICROSOFT by Tony Bove © 2005

The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber ©2004

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

www.linux.org

 

Guilty of the Greatest Sin

This is a story that is open to many interpretations. please be sure to tell me yours.

Guilty of the greatest sin

 

I walk down a dirt road

A road that goes nowhere

On either side of me I see bits of smashed houses

And dolls with missing limbs

Brown dirt shining crimson in the sunset

All I see on the horizon

Is more endless dirt road

I do not know where I am going

 

After walking for miles upon miles

I come to a bush, adorned with white flowers

Alone in miles of empty, dirt floored hell

It watches a disturbing scene

 

A mutated animal bakes in the sun

Not dead, but clinging to a painful, elongated life

A bleached red sky casts light on bloodshot eyes,

Barred yellow teeth

Dry blood covers its face

And a gash in its leg dyes the dirt a murky red

Next to it, its starving offspring moans

Looking for milk that will never come

 

I ignore them and walk on

For I must go the same way

I must live the nightmare I have created

And the death that I have bred

 

This poem is inspired by a painting by TL Solien called

The Seduction of Innocence

this is the picture that the poem is based off of

 

 

 

A Shady Wonder

one of my first poems. 

A Shady Wonder

By Seth Lesondak

 

Its bark is rough like fresh dried brick,

carrying the natural,

beautiful ruggedness of a nature trail.

It is a giant octopus,

tentacles swaying,

squirting green leafy ink.

It is a miner, tunneling underground

where I cannot see.

Does it serve me a purpose?

What can I say?

I sit in its shade.

rowing poem

I am a rower myself, and for lack of something better to do, i wrote a short poem on rowing.

 hope you enjoy.

Rowing

By Seth Lesondak

 

I sit up at the catch,

poised to spring,

packed with potential energy.

Then my legs shoot back,

followed by my torso,

then arms.

I take a quick breath

while the boat sweeps forward,

then return to the catch:

Arms, body, legs

ready to begin again.

 

Gravestones: a short story

this is a short kindof essay story thing. Its partially true, but not totally. still, it sounds pretty good read aloud.

To Walk Through the Gravestones

By Seth Lesondak

 

            Last year I was a pallbearer at my great grandfather’s funeral. It feels like an eternity has gone by since then. Now, my family and I go to visit the cemetery where my great grandfather and grandmother lie in eternal sleep. I like to leave my family and walk alone through the immense tombs. The air is misty with drizzle and the sky a heartbreaking grey. My eyes glance over the names on the headstones. Most of them are Eastern European, like “Bedrick.” The stones in this cemetery are old and dramatic, towering over me like hundreds of gateway arches. The names there are transcribed in a calligraphic Blackletter font that conveys both something fanciful and primitive. I imagine what the people were like who lie under these stones. My great grandfather was a ballroom dancer. As I think this, I see his stone. My family is not rich and thus his marker is small, very distinct against its background of eight foot tall tombstones. I sit with my back to it.

            As I look into the mist, I can see only three headstones. The rest have been swallowed by the ever thickening fog. It feels quiet here, but not silent. It is as if each deceased person whispers their life story to the rare passerby. I can remember back many years to my great grandmother’s funeral. The weather was similar, just more rain and less mist. There I had tossed flowers on the casket after it was lowered into the grave.

            Now I stand and take the cell phone from my pocket to check the time. I still have a good half an hour before I must meet up with my family. I realize how truly alone I am. Even if society discovered a cure for cancer, or someone invented the ultimate fuel efficient car, I would not know it. Here at the graveyard, there is no technology but for the silent phone in my pocket. There are barely any people. It feels like the whole universe consists only of the whispering dead, the towering tombstones and me.      

Chimp Poem

here is a sweet little poem i put together that i somehow got to ryhme:

Chimpanzee

By Seth Lesondak

I wave at the humans who stroll by my cage

Who roil and boil with bottled up rage

Relaxed, I am, in my sunbeam filled room

Till my friend gets pissed off and starts to go boom

This cage you see, doesn’t have lots of space

Our great chimpy talents just all go to waste

It’s sad because we’ll still have no freedom

We’ll just have to wait for our big chance at treedom