Welcome to my blog! It is nice to have you here.

I am blogging today from Hilo, Hawaii, as I begin sabbaticaling. And figuring out if that is how to spell “sabbaticaling.” And also figuring out how to make a blog. This is what I have made so far.

This blog, Where No Mangoes, is here so we can keep in touch, and so you can follow my travels. I am on sabbatical — otherwise known as a legitimate break from teaching for a semester for which an exploded appendix and emergency surgery are NOT a prerequisite — for the entire Spring 2024 semester, from January to May. Which of course explains why I plan to be on the road from December to August.

Sometimes I may use this blog to follow my own travels; I have found that occasionally it is useful to see where one has been. I plan to have some narrative and information-y Travel pages, and some hopefully thoughtful and coherent Satire pages, as well as a secure place for your comments and messages, as soon as I figure out how to do all that.

“I am blogging today from Hilo, Hawaii” is not something I thought I’d ever write! I have dreamed about being in Hawaii since I was a child. I still have the “Learn To Speak Hawaiian” brochure I ordered from the Hawaii Tourist Board via a stamped, self-addressed envelope, requested when I was about 11. I watched Elvis in Blue Hawaii multiple times (on the black and white, grainy UHF Channel 53). All available sources pointed to Hawaii’s being a place of lush flowers, huge greeny leaves, and some sort of calmly swaying landscape and culture. A place of unlimited happiness. And despite the grainy black and white, a place of bright colors. Hawaii had to be some sort of upbeat polar opposite to Pittsburgh, my hometown.

Well, I am here now, and Hawaii is all that.

But more to the point, I have dreamed of having a flipping sabbatical since before I began teaching! It seemed to me at the outset that you teach a bit, and then you go on a sabbatical. Well I got that wrong. You begin teaching in 1993, at the University of London, Goldsmiths College, and thirty years later, you get to type: “I am blogging today from Hilo, Hawaii, as I begin sabbaticaling.”

But the nice thing is, you don’t really care whether or not “sabbaticaling” is a word. Because you are starting off doing it in Hawaii.