Icosahedrons, Poetry, and the “reluctant tangler”

One of my favorite bloggers has gotten me to *reluctantly* try to do something artistic, but not in my “normal” forms. Oh, no. She has convinced me to do something akin to *drawing.*  This craze that seems to be sweeping wildly across the internet as if a blog could itself be “tangled.” Yes, grâce à  Sammy D at Bemuzin, I found yet another fantastique A to Z-er at Alphabet Salad and then I kept following links from there…I got a few tiles and a few pens and a book. And because this is the way I am, I researched the internet and I read some more. And then I read some more. I wanted to make sure I was doing this thing “correctly,” you see.  And enfin, j’ai fait mon premier “Zentangle®.”  Voilà :

 

The Reluctant Tangler (for Sammy D)

As it turns out, I really like this activity! Is it art? Yes, but is it art when *I* do it? You decide.

So…icosahedrons. I didn’t actually buy the official “kit” for the tangling, but if I had, it would have come with one, for choosing a random pattern. The old twenty-sided die is indeed a useful “randomizer.”  I hadn’t thought of this little gem for years, and now all of a sudden I’m thinking about them. One of our friends recently bought an icosahedron ice cube mold!  I have no idea where he got it, but he also got one shaped like a “Death Star!” Super cool. Oh wait, I guess that’s actually super geeky, isn’t it.  Oh, but back “in the day” those twenty-siders determined all sorts of luck, good and bad. Yes, in my college days I played that one role-playing game…you know the one. So, you roll a 20 and kill a troll with one hit of your magic sword, but roll a 1 and your best friend (who happens to be a half-giant) stumbles, falls on you, and you die. That’s the way things went sometimes.

Anyway I started cleaning off my desk, and some boxes surrounding said desk, and I came across a list of 100 French words that I made quite a while ago, 100 words that I just liked the sound of. Back when I was a true debutante, a French teacher suggested the idea of taking several of these words and trying to make des petits poèmes en français in just a sentence or two. Rediscovering the list and thinking about the twenty-sided die inspired me to go down to my “pit of despair”…oops, I mean my basement, and look for that little cloth bag containing not only icosahedrons, but also dodecahedrons, decahedrons, tetrahedrons, and, well, you know, “cubes” (or maybe I should say “hexahedron” here for the sake of continuity? Anyway, I had 100 words so I thought 2 of those decahedrons rolled together ought to do it.  I could roll 5 times, get 5 words, and then use the “verb of the week” to make it into a sentence, maybe even with a little poetic quality to it. Alas, I came back upstairs sneezing, and dice-less. I texted my husband to see if he knew where they were. No dice (ha ha, pun definitely intended, yes I know it’s a poor excuse for humor!)

I may resort to a “random number generator” on the internet, but it’s nowhere near as fun! I promise to give this a try and include one in a post tomorrow, with “les mots de mercredi”  As you may have noticed, that particular alliterative title is not working for me because obviously tomorrow is Friday! So to give myself more latitude I shall henceforth call these posts, “Comment dit-on…en français?” or “What I learned this week.” 

Merci, chers lecteurs, c’est tout pour aujourd’hui!