Plus-Size Twittering

I have a friend in Tehran. Her name is Miriam…yes, that’s my wife’s name…no, my wife has not emigrated. Let’s try this again.

I have a friend in Tehran. Her name is میریام. (But I’m going to stick with using “Miriam” unless I refer to her and my wife in the same sentence again and it’s too confusing.) I’m writing about her because…well, I don’t know where I’m going with writing this. This is unusual for me. Generally I don’t write something to my blog unless I have a specific purpose to doing so, and with a picture of what I want it to say when I’m done. So this should be interesting.

Beginning

I don’t remember exactly when our paths first crossed. It was a couple of days after the start of the Iran election protests is about the closest I can recall it. And of course, like most everything I blog about, it starts as a Twitter story.

On whatever day that was, someone I follow re-tweeted something of Miriam’s. I wish I could remember exactly what it was now, but I’ve forgotten. My instinct is that it wasn’t so much about what that specific tweet said as it was the whole body of her writing, when I went to go read her page. To give some context to this, by this time it was already clear that Twitter was a communication focal point to get information out of Iran. There were already various people who were twittering from inside Tehran in English, and so were achieving a level of notoriety among the community as a result. That was completely understandable. Everyone outside Iran was suddenly anxious to hear what was going on inside.

But I was getting plenty of that sort of news from assorted blogs, the #iranelection stream, and so on. So I wasn’t looking for more of that. And while Miriam was writing about those topics, her writing was more than that too. It was about being at this moment in history where just before the only worry was university studies. It was about her brother. It was about her mother threatening to throw the computer out the window if she didn’t go to bed already. It was about…life.

This appealed to me. Because for all the fun Twitter is for following your favorite famous persona, sometimes tweeting at them, and occasionally maybe getting a reply from them, I enjoy Twitter best just for interacting with people. Through it, I’ve made new friends that run the gamut from living just a few miles away to across the country to across the Atlantic. So it was my pleasure to begin following Miriam’s tweets. Sometimes I would comment on them or offer a word of support, whether the topic was life in general or the uprising in particular. And in turn occasionally I would get a reply from her which, given the day-to-day circumstances she and her loved ones were living through, was always greatly appreciated. It was a slow, baby-step process of making someone’s acquaintance, certainly. It was enough though to get a basic sense of who she was and what her beliefs were. Shortly thereafter people purported to be agents of the Iranian government started writing fake re-tweets in the name of various people tweeting about the uprising from in Iran, including a rather…impolite/vulgar one in Miriam’s name. When she later tweeted to disavow the fake message, it was with both complete honesty and conviction that I replied that I had dismissed the fake message, because its tone was so completely out of character.

Middle

Then came a bad day. 20 June was planned as another day of street protests. I went to bed wondering what would happen while I was asleep, since the Supreme Leader had warned the previous day that further protests would be met with a harsh response. And there was.

With the timezone differences, by the time my 20 June was getting started, it was night there. The crackdown had happened. And Miriam’s Twitter account no longer existed. I have previously hinted at my distress, but truth be told that was an understatement. One of the news sites that had been liveblogging the uprising had a post up collecting tweets from that day. Miriam’s was one that was quoted, written that morning – maybe the last one she had wrote on the account (I was never sure): “forces dont let ppl use cell phones. they beat anyone with a cell phone in hand :(( ” So no, I was not simply distressed. I was completely in fear for her life, and worried for her family.

But you know what? There’s not a whole lot you can do from almost 7,000 miles away. I left her a note at the only place I knew, the last TwitPic she had posted from that day. And that was about all.

Until…. (You knew there was an "until" coming, right? Because otherwise this story would have had a really depressing ending.)

Sometime that night, I remembered that from time to time Miriam would have tweets tagged as coming from FriendFeed, or otherwise made references to FriendFeed URLs. Previously, I didn’t have much interest in FriendFeed. Since I was already using Twitter and Facebook, I hadn’t wanted to start exploring another social network. But now, it was suddenly important to me. Fortunately, while all her tweets were gone from the Twitter web site, the 3rd-party software program I use for twittering keeps a rolling backlog of old messages, so I was able to find one with the URL I needed to find Miriam on FriendFeed.

(This ends the technological detective portion of our story, coming soon to TV as “CSI: Social Networks.”)

Her account was private, meaning you had to request access from the person to be able to read it. So I made a request. If I didn’t get an answer, I would resign myself to possibly never knowing what happened to her. As I’m writing this and sifting through memories, I swear by my recollection it felt like days before an answer came. But I looked it up on FriendFeed. It was only two hours. I still think FriendFeed lies about it, because there was a lot of eternity crammed into those two hours.

Not the End

As I start writing this section, I think for the first time I have an idea of why I felt the need to write this blog entry. But let’s go to the finish and see if I’m right. No sense spoiling the story yet.

Miriam was, of course, still here, and as well as you could ask for given what had transpired. So, once my relief settled back to some sort of emotional normal level, I started settling into using FriendFeed. Two things immediately stood out:

1. I was suddenly introduced to a big community: Miriam’s friends. This was daunting. Why? Partly because it was a lot of people at once. Partly because…
2. …naturally, everyone was mostly writing in Persian.

Can you say “language barrier”? Of course you can! But you know, after that initial hesitation, it never really crossed my mind to let it drive me away, or push me into silence, or whatever. I think, looking at it in retrospect, I felt like after all the angst suffered, it would’ve been stupid to say “Glad to see you’re alive; good luck with that revolution thing” and just walk away. And it would’ve been my loss if I had. But more about that in a minute.

Back to the language battle. Armed with Google Translator and babylon translation (which is actually worse than Google most of the time, but sometimes will render something exactly right when Google just mangles it), I dove into trying to understand the conversations around me. It is often not easy. As Miriam pointed out to me once when we were discussing it, these tools render translations very literally, as opposed to in a more conversational or colloquial manner. So my day-to-day reading success varies widely. Sometimes I can get the gist of what is being discussed from the too-literal translated words. (Recently I managed to guess from a sentence’s context that Google meant “Workaholic” when it gave me “Vrkvhalyk”. You realize that your life has gone in a new interesting direction when you get pleasure from guessing such things correctly.) And from sheer repetition, I’ve come to know immediately what is being said in snippets of conversational phrases from certain literal translations that the tools will give me. Other times, I might only glean a few key words. Still other times, maybe just an odd word or two combined with the emoticons people are using give me little more than a general feel for the emotional state of the conversation. (Sometimes, a whole day’s worth of conversations look like that to me. On those days, I feel like Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation: an empath among aliens.)

People have been very nice about this stranger in their midst though. Occasionally I’d had conversations with a few of them — particularly when I happened to translate something and discovered my name in the text because someone was asking how I knew what was being said. (I have to admit, I enjoyed jumping into those conversations. I wonder how many other conversations like that I’ve missed?) And without fail, Miriam and her friends have offered to help me anytime there was something I wanted to understand but couldn’t. I try not to be a pest about doing that, though. So far, Miriam tells me, I’ve correctly divined the essence of those conversations that I’ve felt brave enough to insert myself into. I think though I’m a little too shy about asking. Today, for example, I think I missed something of some importance because I had one of those vague emotional senses that something was up, but I didn’t ask. Maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong. (Postscript from the next day: I wasn’t wrong.)

Truth is, it’s hard for me to ask. With so much conversation going on that I can’t grasp well, I don’t want to be a bother and ask about things that turn out to be the minutiae of life like "I’m washing my hair" or something. So I hope that the times I miss something important and only find out after the fact, I don’t come off as uncaring. It’s just hard to start one step behind the rest of the group all the time. I have seriously wondered about finding a course that would teach me to at least read Persian, and maybe speak it.

Still Not the End

By now, I would not be surprised if you are wondering why I go to all this trouble. To be honest, while writing the last section I wondered that myself. The short answer is, I think, is because her friendship is worth it to me. I hope that’s not too anticlimactic. Here’s an attempt at a longer answer:

I am not a person who makes a lot of friends. I tend to be more of a solitary sort. I’m just mentally wired that way, for whatever reason. Of the friends I make, probably more of them I only know online as opposed to offline. Online friendships, when they connect on some level beyond the uppermost casual or superficial, do so (I think) because of the effort it takes to make that happen. When all you basically have is the written word, the words you choose need to come from some level of yourself some increment closer to your heart. And those words need to come with some level of forthrightness or honesty. Because they’re all you’ve got to work with, so they’d better speak true.

So if I meet someone whose writing attracts my attention, that’s what I tend to bring to the table. And if I feel like I’m being reciprocated on some level, then hopefully you have the evolution of a friendship. When it works, it’s really quite satisfying. And when talking to Miriam it feels like it works, and it feels satisfying.

Once I remarked to میریام that she often comes up in conversation between Miriam and I. She expressed surprise at that, since she self-described her life as normal and boring and not interesting. Hopefully it’s not impertinent to tell a lady she’s wrong, but I can’t agree. I’ve enjoyed conversations with her that span all sorts of topics.

• A morning where every piece of music she brought up sent me to iTunes to dust it off and replay it, until I had to delightfully note that I was being thoroughly distracted from getting any work done.
• Learning the meaning of a verse of the Qur’an.
• Occasionally, a little geopolitics.
• Morning greetings in my evening, and vice versa.
• Working long hours.
• Birthdays celebrated.
• Good days and bad days. Days of smiles, and days of sadness.
• The weather, because what’s a little small talk without it?
• Shared pictures.

That isn’t boring. That’s valuable. That’s a winning hand in the game of life, the bad days included. (Just because the game’s rules permit bad days doesn’t mean we stop playing to win.) It’s just, at the core, enjoying life with the people who are traveling with you on the journey. As much as I may tend toward solitude, it’s a long journey. Having good companions along the way is important, be they friends or family. I think it’s worth celebrating when you meet a new one.

Probably the End

So, I think I’m coming to the end of this tale. If you’re still reading, thank you. And if you’re still wondering whether I guessed why I’m writing this, the answer is: partially.

Partially because my wife encouraged me to blog it.

Partially because I think on some level I needed to share with Miriam the long-form version of my short answer “her friendship is worth it to me” from earlier.

Partially because I needed to tell the story, and this is the part I don’t think I knew when I started writing. I needed to frame it into one narrative, start to finish. Both for myself, because I needed to process it in my own mind, and because I wanted Miriam to hear the narrative from beginning to end. (I hope she reads it.) Probably somewhere in our conversations I’ve very lightly touched on some of this stuff, but I don’t know how I would get to a place where I could tell this whole story in a casual conversation.

And now that the story is told? I hope it helps her understand why (for now anyway) I still feel like a Stranger in a Strange Land, or the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I’m still figuring out how I fit in, but I know one thing about that I can say.

As I’ve been writing this (it’s been about a week so far and counting), Miriam has been going through challenging times on a personal level. Just today, as I thought I was about done revising this, life placed another new obstacle in her path. And yet she carries on with more composure than I know I would have in similar circumstances. And more smiles too! The sad emotions are there and rise to the surface sometimes. (Which has to happen to stay mentally healthy, I would say, for everyone facing a hard time. It’s only human.) But the smiles are always there too. Even when I come along like a pesky younger brother with a question. I admire her strength of character. So it is my sincere wish that perhaps for just one day, for just one time within that day when the sadness arises, these words provide her an outside perspective of herself, a positive perspective that helps that one day get back to equilibrium. That would be gratifying to me.

Really the End

It’s really the end now, except I can’t find my ending! So, I will end with an anecdote.

The other day, when میریام came up in conversation, Miriam expressed a wish to one day visit her in Iran, or host her for a visit here. I cannot help but wonder with a smile how میریام would react to that, given her incredulity that she’s a conversation subject around this house to start with. My own reaction, as I remember it, was uncertainty. Not uncertainty that I would want to have either of those things come to pass, just uncertainty that they could. But one thing I know about my wife: if she decides something is going to happen, the universe had better get ready because she will manifest it to be so. Therefore I close no doors. Instead, I hope one day soon to have the three of us in a delightfully confusing conversation where I say “Miriam” and no one is sure to whom I am speaking….

Until then, I have a friend in Tehran, and her name is میریام. I wish her well every day. How could I not, for someone who makes time for my children in her daily prayers?

Tags: FriendFeed, Iran, Miriam Mason, Twitter, میریام