You know, we usually take it for granted.

Here are some thoughts. Or should I say reflections?

1. Usually you look through it, unless it’s dirty. You know, a pane of glass.
2. I don’t know about you, but I find washing windows to be a pain.
3. It can also be something you drink from. Or a quantity. (“I’ll take a glass of milk, please.”)
4. Or something to boost your vision. (“Now where are my glasses?”)
5. It can have very sharp edges, sometimes used in tools or instruments.
6. Traditionally, it’s made from silicon dioxide (SO₂), a common constituent of sand and coming from quartz flakes. Because of the high temperatures required to work with pure silica, most glass is made with additives that lower the required heating levels and allow for different varieties of glass, soda-lime being the most common. Borosilicate gives Pyrex, and lead glass being the most brilliant and having a lower melting point.
7. Contrary to a widespread thought, it is not a solid liquid but rather an amorphous (non-crystalline) solid, allowing it transparency. In addition, it’s chemically inert, which is why it’s so wonderful for bottles and jars.
8. Fiberglass is stronger than many metals by weight, non-magnetic, non-conductive, can be molded into complex shapes, and is generally chemically inert. Its applications include aircraft, boats, automobiles, bathtubs and enclosures, hot tubs, swimming pools, septic tanks, water tanks, roofing, pipes, cladding, surfboards, and orthopedic casts. It could easily be a Tendrils of its own.
9. Spun glass is probably best known as insulation, while its use as fiber-optics cable is touted as superior to traditional copper wiring.
10. The oldest known glass objects are beads, perhaps originating as an accidental byproduct of metalworking or lead glazes for pottery.

Technological advances in glassmaking could furnish a Tendril on its own, but let’s not overlook the fact that one of the most recent gives us the tough glass that’s on the screen of the laptop or smart phone where you’re likely reading this.

Here are ten more confessions on being a published author.

1. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” – Mark Twain
2. “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” ― Stephen King
3. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” – Jules Renard
4. “My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.” – Ken Follett
5. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” – Harper Lee
6. “One of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less … My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there … One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
7. “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.” – Isaac Asimov
8. “Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn’t feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That’s my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.” – Jennifer Salaiz
9. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” – Sylvia Plath
10. “I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” – James Lee Burke

With their many different species, jellyfish are found in every ocean in the world, including very cold waters of the Arctic and Antarctic. Some are even found in freshwater. Some species live in shallow, sunlit waters near the surface, while others live in the deep, dark, cold or somewhere in-between. Here are a few other points.

1. They predate dinosaurs, bobbing along in the currents for at least 500 million years and possibly 700 million years, roughly three times the age of the first dinosaurs.
2. They aren’t fish. They don’t have a backbone or spine, nor do they have brains, hearts, eyes, scales, gills, or fins. Instead, they swim by opening and closing their “bells.” Many scientists simply group them as “gelatinous zooplankton.”
3. A few species have surprisingly complex vision. For instance, the box jellyfish has 24 “eyes,” two of which can see in color. It’s also believed this animal’s complicated array of visual sensors makes it one of the few creatures to have a full 360-degree view of its environment.
4. Its lifespan depends on the species in question. Some live for just a few days or weeks, while others can live for several decades or more. One species, called the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii), is capable of reversing its life cycle and returning to a younger stage of development after it reaches sexual maturity. This means that it can essentially live forever as long as it is not killed by predators or other external factors.
5. This ability is a major subject of research, as it could help the medical field understand how to turn cancerous cells into noncancerous cells like muscles, nerves, or skin.
6. Jellyfish use tentacles to catch their food. These long, thin appendages on the sides and bottom of the jellyfish’s body are covered in tiny stinging cells that contain a venom to stun and capture prey. When they encounter something edible, they use their tentacles to bring it closer to their mouth, located in the center of their body.
7. They are carnivores, meaning they eat other animals. Since they’re unable to chew their food, they usually eat small marine animals they can swallow whole, such as
8. plankton, small fish, and crustaceans like shrimp and lobsters. They’ll also eat smaller jellyfish.
9. The power of their stings can vary widely depending on the species. The most venomous is probably the box jellyfish, capable of killing an adult human in just a few minutes with a single sting. Each box jellyfish reportedly carries enough venom to kill more than 60 humans. To make matters worse, their stings are excruciatingly painful — it’s said the pain could kill you before the venom does.
10. Jellyfish are eaten by larger predators, such as tuna, sea turtles, and whales. They’re even a delicacy in some places, such as in Japan and Korea. The Japanese have transformed jellyfish into candy. More often, they find their way into salads, fried into crunchy noodles, or are eaten with soy sauce like sushi.

Do you require getting out in nature when it comes to maintaining your sanity and soul? I certainly do. In fact, one of my struggles living in Fostoria was the relative lack of that exposure, even though the small city was surrounded by some very productive farmland. I wanted something a little wilder and freer.

Here are ten perspectives:

1. “In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” — Alice Walker
2. “I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” — John Burroughs
3. “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu
4. “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
5. “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” — Aristotle
6. “Nature is the art of God.” — Dante Alighieri
7. “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” — Rachel Carson
8. “If you can’t be in awe of Mother Nature, there’s something wrong with you.” — Alex Trebek
9. “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” — Gary Snyder
10. “You are a guest of nature — behave.” — Friedensreich Hundertwasser

1. Poets who expect to read as soon as they arrive and then depart when they’re done.
2. Those who have not revised their work.
3. Those who hold the stand too long.
4. People who don’t laugh at my funniest lines.
5. Readers who arrive when I’ve just ended.
6. Folks I’ve heard who won’t hear me.
7. Nights there’s no sharing, no worship of the muse. Too much competition.
8. Dishonesty. Pretense. Would-be actors.
9. Poets led astray by bad models. Wrong breathing. Lines that don’t fit the poet’s mouth.
10. Erroneous observations, fallacious reasoning. The facts must be correct.

You could add listeners who try to categorize each reader. or overly critical folks like me.

He got his name from signs I saw all over campus. NO SMOKING. Just move the space and it became Nosmo King. He was a solidly black cat with Siamese lines and smarts. As I noted when he was a kitten:

1. He’s been here two weeks. Or is it three?
2. Gained a pound.
3. Approaching adolescence, he’s learning the ropes.
4. Out of control.
5. Banging the walls.
6. Losing his balls.
7. Jumping to the table top.
8. Forgetting to wipe behind.
9. Staying up all night.
10. Adding chaos to our lives, not that he cares.

Or “heh-ell,” as the dialect might say. It’s been a half-century now since I left Bloomington as a research associate, and a few years before, when I graduated.

Rather than rave about the graduate library or the celebrated rare-books temple or the music or business schools, let me take a different tack, as viewed from now.

1. We’re still in disbelief that the football team could have a winning season, much less be ranked in the nation’s top 25 teams. Basketball’s a different matter.
2. Considering the conservative nature of the state, it’s a bit shocking that the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction is located on the campus. Its extensive archives and research initiatives are discreetly housed, though, in the ivy-covered former Women’s Residence Center – or was, back then.
3. Its collegiate gothic-style buildings are clad in locally quarried limestone. As are some more contemporary ones.
4. The stream that meanders through wooded parts of the campus is called the Jordan River, not as a Biblical reference but rather in honor of David Starr Jordan, the school’s first non-ordained minister to serve as president – he was a scientist who believed in Darwinian evolution and left Bloomington after six years to launch Stanford University in California.
5. Founded as a seminary in 1820, the school is one of the oldest public universities in America.
6. The alma mater, “Hail to Old IU,” was set to “Annie Lisle.” a Scottish melody, as was Cornell University’s, and perhaps brought to Bloomington from Ithaca, New York, by Cornell alumni Jordan.
7. A practical joke is spelled “boress” but pronounced a bit differently.
8. The dining hall service continues to suck, as I’m finding in online comments. It was a major factor in the upheavals in my novel, Daffodil Uprising.
9. On-campus parking is limited and expensive.
10. Nobody’s ever figured out what “Hoosier” means, as far as I can tell.

Let’s clarify.

1. Not in hallways, parking lots, malls, or many suburban housing developments.
2. Not purely for exercise, especially walking in circles.
3. Often, I’ve found downtowns invigorating.
4. Neighborhoods with homes that reflect individuality and care. Craftsmanship, detail. Gardening, shrubbery, and trees, too. Ivy can be magical.
5. To get from one point to another. Think of exploring.
6. On trails. (Going back to Boy Scouts.)
7. Forests.
8. Riversides and beaches.
9. Up and down a hill or a mountain.
10. As a break in the practice of writing or revising. I’m recalling the orchard and irrigation canal banks, especially.

Celebrities get the headlines, of course. What makes them so special?

“Hollywood marriages are two constructed images colliding,” said bandleader Artie Shaw, reflecting on his ex-wives. He married eight times, in addition to 11 serious girlfriends. So much for expertise.

Let’s turn to ten others.

1. “Experts on romance say for a happy marriage there has to be more than a passionate love. For a lasting union, they insist, there must be a genuine liking for each other. Which, in my book, is a good definition for friendship.” ― Marilyn Monroe
2. “Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably, they are both disappointed.” ― Albert Einstein
3. “A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime that doesn’t mean she can’t have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones.” ― Cher
4. “I am a very committed wife. And I should be committed, too ― for being married so many times. ― Elizabeth Taylor
5. “You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.” ― David Bowie
6. “Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends and not impose on the other … You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each other’s necks.” ― Paul Newman
7. “You never really know a man until you divorce him.” ― Zsa Zsa Gabor
8. “When you first get married, they open the car door for you. Eighteen years now … once he opened the car door for me in the last four years ― we were on the freeway at the time.” ― Joan Rivers
9. “For marriage to be a success, every woman should have their own bathroom. The end.” ― Catherine Zeta-Jones
10. “Huh, celebrity marriages. They never last, do they?” ― Donkey, in Shrek