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?

I have never been a fan of dragonflies.

When I was a kid, we would take vacations down South a lot. So it was in South Carolina (I think) that on one such trip, we visited a plantation. All I remember of the plantation is that the skies were filled with dragonflies. Since I was already scared of flying insects (particularly if they were armed, like bees or wasps), I was not thrilled by the dragonfly population, to say the least.

But you evolve without even knowing that you’re doing it. Yesterday, I was keeping Miriam company while she worked in the front yard.

(Yes, that probably creates an image of me as a lazy sloth. In my defense, I note:)

• That day was Father’s Day.
• I have no green thumb. I’m closer to all thumbs.
• My allergies would probably kill me if I lingered wrist-deep working in a garden for any length of time.

(To continue:)

I noted aloud that a dragonfly was flying patterns over us and the garden. Shortly thereafter it was joined by another, and then another. Circling and diving and looping as fast as they do made it hard to count them, but I think there were six altogether at the peak. As that was going on though, there was a remarkable convergence.

• The wind was strong enough to combine with the various surrounding trees to make a lovely whisper of a sound as the branches rustled, but not so strong as to be unpleasant.
• Since we live on a dead-end street there’s never much traffic, but even the traffic on the main connecting road was basically non-existent.
• The street itself was quiet. For some reason, even though it was a good-weather day, no one was mowing the lawn, revving up a motorcycle (some of our neighbors love their toys), or doing anything else particularly disturbing.

So there was a lovely moment where nature’s silence was both extremely loud, and extremely pleasant.

…

Of course, then a flock of crows up in the trees starting talking (arguing?) amongst themselves, as loudly as crows do. It wasn’t quiet anymore, but it was still nature at work.

Hopefully, if you were one of those who were watching it coming in cold to Trek, you liked it. I have too much history watching it to really feel how it would play to a non-Trek fan. I sort of think you would have to have some sort of background idea what Trek is for it to work for you; probably more than the marketing and hype would have you think.

But I’m more writing this to lay out my thoughts as an almost forty-year fan. So I am going to feel free to drop spoilers in whenever it fits my narrative. So if you haven’t seen the movie yet, run away now.

I mean it.

Really.

OK. Here goes.

The movie was interesting to me. It came across like an invitation to the fan of the “original” Trek to join the party launching the new one. RSVP to Leonard Nimoy, guest of honor.

Last time, I wrote that I was definitely not ready for this changing of the guard. But such a change was clearly the way of the future, ready or not. I suspect that if you were not ready and willing, there’s no way you liked this film. Maybe you did if you took as a neat speculative diversion and then you turned back to the latest novel from Pocket Books. But that’s about it.

Otherwise, this movie basically says to you that your day is done and here comes something new. Some interviews I read pre-release involved the writers noting that there was a conscious effort to make it clear that the “original” Trek and its history is not gone; that what we see in this film is the creation of an alternate timeline. The “original” lives on and is still available for stories and stuff.

I thought the discussions amongst the characters of this idea really didn’t play up this point adequately. At least not as I recall them right now after one screening. What discussion there was came off very academic and all “could be interesting but it doesn’t really matter to our current problems.” Indeed, after many episodes/movies where time travel derails the “proper” course of things and our heroes move heaven, earth, space, and time to “fix” things, there’s basically no one even thinking about trying another repair effort now. I mean, did Spock at least say to Nero after being captured ‘hey, let’s take the red matter, blow up the supernova-star now years ahead of the big boom, and save Romulus’? This whole plot thread had a sense of too-easy-acceptance of change for my taste.

I feel like Paramount wanted to have it both ways. They wanted to make it clear that they’re not throwing old Trek out, but also they want to be all BOOM LOOK WE JUST BLEW VULCAN UP. Either don’t screw with the old fandom that way, or just do a all-out reboot and don’t try to cater at all to the old history.

But once again, this new incarnation is the chosen path by Paramount for future Trek productions. So in the end, I can’t really roast the movie for not pursuing plot points that would undermine that. So instead I’ll walk down the path and look around at various sights.

I loved the entire cast. Everyone found that sweet spot between capturing the look and feel of the character without drifting into imitation or caricature. I do wish Anton Yelchin (Chekov) hadn’t adopted the V-W mangling that Walter Koenig did originally, because it really stood out awkwardly. Maybe that’s just me. Besides, if that’s my biggest complaint, things aren’t so bad.

The Enterprise herself, looking at the exterior, looked better in motion that in the publicity still pictures. She’s still a sweet-looking ship. I had more mixed feelings about the interiors. The really high-tech areas looked great, like the Bridge. The Bridge was another place I wasn’t sure of from still pictures, but it too works better “in action.” It also feels like a more professional operation. Tons of data literally at your fingertips. By contrast, I got so tired in the previous shows/movies watching the captain constantly having to order someone to put “on screen” this week’s object of interest.

Some areas of the ship were designed to not look so high-tech. Those didn’t work as well for me. In particular, the more I think about, the more I really did not like the Engineering set. This is the heart of this 23rd century ship, and it looked outclassed by the Engineering section on the last TV series, Star Trek: Enterprise. And that show’s Enterprise pre-dated the current one by many years. Engineering in the movie looked like something you’d find in the Battlestar Galactica remake. While that show has its own merits, it’s not where I look to for Enterprise design ideas.

Onward.

The story basically works, once you get over the “end of Trek as you know, here’s the new one” thing. Since I basically liked the story, I’ll just look at things that still stick in my craw about it.

I really hated killing off Amanda. It smacked of Women in Refrigerators Syndrome. To be honest, if killing one of Spock’s parents had to be a plot point, I would’ve picked Sarek:

• Sarek dying would’ve paralleled Kirk’s father’s death.
• It’s a more interesting contrast for any future stories if Spock’s surviving parent is a female human, not another male Vulcan.
• The impact of the Vulcan genocide would be heightened if we actually knew one of them personally.

(As an aside, I find the Vulcans’ plight has a Doctor Who “last of the Time Lords” vibe to it, which is interesting.)

(As another aside, I like that the transporter is a lot less magical now that it turned into over 40 years of previous stories.)

Unfortunately, female characters were generally not well-served in my opinion. Uhura’s storyline did not really impress me either. While I like the idea of a Spock-Uhura relationship (particularly in the first season of The Original Series, you can find small moments between them that sort of play very generally in this direction) and welcome the story continuing, it felt like the plot suddenly parachuted into the movie. And without it, Uhura really didn’t have much to do but be a target of Kirk’s flirtation. Also, I got annoyed in this movie by people running off the Bridge repeatedly. Uhura runs off at least twice to be there for Spock in the turbolift; Chekov runs off to do transporter voodoo. It creates an undisciplined atmosphere that’s hard to believe.

Meanwhile, the whole “origin story” basically works (it’s not really that complicated a plot), but some moments feel really forced in order to make it work. The whole idea that Kirk goes from cadet on academic suspension to captain of the flagship of the fleet is the main offender. Clearly no one wanted to spend multiple movies assembling the crew on the Enterprise, and I wouldn’t want to watch those movies either, so I’ll give it a pass.

I’m more curious now about future stories. There has been some punditry of late that Trek may be resurging just at the right time. That Trek’s general theme of optimism about the future fits in with the general optimistic air created by the election of Barack Obama. (Here’s one example.) That may be so. But there is also the theme of “seeking out new life” and the lessons it sometimes taught the viewer along the way. Trek got away from that when it moved into movies and became more about the Big Event of this movie. (The Voyage Home and to some degree The Undiscovered Country were exceptions, with their broader environmental and political themes.) Frankly, telling an “origin story” was the easy part. It’s been done before. (The novel Enterprise: The First Adventure is still worth the time to read.) The question now, if this version of Trek is to be the version, where will it go from here? Can and will it tell stories that are more than just big summer movie adventures? It’s hard to know. The original was something “more” than a TV show. And I say that even though I liked this film. I quibble with some of its details — and don’t get me started on some of the science in it — but it captures the spirit of its predecessor.

But the original was many things. It was that diverse group of characters that you didn’t see put together on television at that time. It was stories that tried to say something about humanity, about the issues of the day, and about our future. (Slate just ran a nice piece looking at how past Trek stories resonate with today’s debate about torture.) I don’t know if this new incarnation of Trek can have the same impact, especially in the once every few years movie format. If it can, it will have truly earned its place. If it can’t…if it’s just a big summer adventure every couple of years, only with a different cast, it will be seriously time to ask why anyone bothered with the effort. (Besides the quest for the almighty dollar.)

For the here and now, I opened the invitation to check out the party. Assorted misgivings aside, I liked it. I loved that my son Owen loved it. His excitement reminded me of being a young boy and first discovering Trek. Miriam saw it with us too, and was very pleased by it. So, in the optimistic spirit, we look forward to the future of Trek. It’s certainly not a sure thing, but hopefully it will be bright.

And do it out loud. It makes life less complicated. And you look less stupid.

Thank you. We now return to your movie already in progress. The flight attendants will be by with peanuts shortly.