Will the real Articulate Dad please stand up?

Years ago, bored in the afternoons after school, latchkey kid that I was, seeking noise to accompany my silence, distraction to partner with my half-attentive homeworking, I would turn on the television. One of the shows I occasioned upon was "the Dating Game" from which the unforgettable phrase "will the real [name] please stand up" emerged.

The past month or so, visits to my PRW (personal research website) have rivaled or surpassed those to this blog. Which represents the real me? Both, of course. Both different sides of the real me. I think of Ahistoricality's comment to yesterday's post.

you put up less of a persona than most

I take that as a compliment. But I realize that what I share online is only part of me. This blog presents a side of me that needs to be released. I hope that by sharing the trials I am going through, others will see that they are not alone. But I am not entirely altruistic: I like to have a soap box, and I find that writing can't help purge my demons.

The PRW represents a side of me that is very real as well. The side my intellect most associates with, my work (or rather, part of it). I don't discuss personal issues there. Each compartment to its own function. Together they make (more of) the whole.

As many of my regular readers will know, a back-burner project of mine is a memoir of my father, including a collection of his writings. Back in July on a blog I keep dedicated to my father's writing, which serves in a way as a sketch for the memoir/collection I wish to eventually publish, I mused at how often we have on our shelves a collected works of one scholar/scientist/author or another, and how insignificant their life's work may somehow seem, when contained between the covers of a single book. The book, as we all know, contains only a part, but a recoverable, public part. The rest is lost in transience.

It is alright. Life is like that. Transience makes the day to day ever more precious. Something to remember.