SwimFinsSF

Last Dance

Stephen’s Memorial was today.. Well actually – they called it a celebration of his life which was EXACTLY what it was… They reserved the bar at this great restaurant in down town San Jose which was aparanetly Stephen and Tyrone’s favorite and had a huge party.. It was GREAT… There were so many people there and everyone had a great time.. We all talked about him… We saw the pictures his family had brought of his life… we cried a little… some came in drag… some wore marti gras beads… some were friends from work.. some were the gay boys from apple… some were friends.. some were family… some were from who knows where…

But at the end it was exactly what it should have been… a celebration of a really wonderful guy who touched more people than i’m sure he knew… So many people love him… Tyrone was a trooper… Stephen’s mother was there and was great.. She was clearly devistated to have lost her baby but I hope it gave her some comfort to know how many people loved the guy…

On the way home matt, kevin, and I had a great talk about what comes after death… god… the usual things you think about when something like this happens… but it was nice to talk about it regardless…

And… to top it off… as we got out of the car after the drive home… Donna Summer’s ‘Last Dance’ came on the stereo…

Made me smile…

He’ll stay with me… With all of us…

My Sweetie

OK… So Brian took the BEST picture of Kevin at the Oscar’s party – I HAD to post it..

Now I would pay CASH MONEY if I could find just one picture of me that I really like! 🙂

Stephen Burleson 5/18/66 – 3/23/03

Many of us lost a friend today…

Makes the other things in life seem so unimportant and trite… Makes me feel incredibly lucky to have the people around me that I do… Makes me feel like I don’t let them know that nearly enough…

Makes me happy to have seen his smile and his laugh and have that to remember him by!

If you see Tyrone give him your love… He’s going to need it more than he’ll probably let on!

Elementary School & War

TOO Odd… So I get this phone call from my mom at work today… “Turn on KQED… Listen to who they’re interviewing”… Turns out one of the correspondants that is traveling with the troops in Kuwait is a guy that I knew from when I was a LITTLE kid… Arian Campo-Flores aparently works for Newsweek now but he and I used to live in Irvine, CA many moons ago.. Knew him when I was in elementary school and junior high… We went to the same high school too but kind of drifted apart by that point (not that we were best friends anyway – but still…)… He went to Cal and saw him in passing on the street in San Francisco a couple of years ago – didn’t relaize who it was until about an hour later…

Anyway… kinda random and silly… funny where life takes people… I’m sitting in a koosh house in SF and he’s on the back of a tank in Kuwait…

Wierdness

Roller coaster day…

Alarm clock didn’t go off for some reason (or maybe it went off and I turned it off without bothering to wake up – you’d have to ask kevin)…. So I woke up EXACTLY when I was supposed to BE at the gym… throw on gym clothes and my contacts and flew down to meet matt to lift heavy things..

Got back… oh shit… we’re at war… TV was spewing constant news with no content cuz they didn’t know shit but didn’t want to be the last station to say they didn’t know shit… Wierd…

Got to work and Apple is playing a live web feed of CNN so we can know whats goign on – like I need news coming at me from yet ANOTHER angle… They had good intentions tho…

Productive day though.. Fixed some bugs in the morning, discussed futures for our product before lunch, and then solved a pretty nasty problem capturing video with another co-worker all afternoon – was actually a REALLY fun day work wise – kind of stuff I like doing..

End of the day SUCKED though… ended to hear that a friend of mine who got sick recently isn’t improving like we had hoped and that REALLY bummed me out… I’m sure I’ll talk more about it later but this isn’t how I want others to hear about things…

Just got my call from the Red Cross to make sure i’m available to help this evening if there is an emergency (I’m on call 3 nights a week with them)

Now I’m home and figuring out what to do for dinner and trying to avoid turning on the TV….

Pretty average and boaring day acctually – just seemed like a loopy roller coaster – maybe its just that the world is on a loopy roller coaster and I feel odd holding still..

Ah well…

A new home

So I got REALLY sick of dealign with the silly little bugs I was running into on blogger and matt, being the super cool guy that he is, has given me a home on his site so i’m going to use that one instead.. So i’m over here now – and i’ll move my old entries from blogger over here.. (and see if I can preserve the post dates! 🙂