Classmate Response #1 Week 1

Kelsey's Calisthenic:

In this Calisthenics post I wanted to try doing "the maggot" exercise again because what I came up with in class didn't satisfy me. I knew I could do better, given a little more time.

First I tried to think of something that resembled a maggot, but I didn't want it to be too cliche because we are trying to stay away from that. My train of thought here goes a little crazy so I will try to keep this simple and hope that you can follow along!

I started with a physical description of what a maggot is in my head: stubby, white, and...nasty. I took white, played with that word a bit and came up with pale. In my mind pale leads to death (because I'm morbid like that.) Death is what I stuck with for that description so I went on to stubby. I actually tried to think of something that was dead but still stubby, which was hard since most dead things are thinner versions of themself. I tacked these two descriptions together and (somehow) came up with: "The bloated fingers of a dead child."

I wanted to mess around with their eating habbits and put this in the line too. I wanted to use the word disappear but that was average and had too many syllables. I don't know if this is cheating but I looked up its synonyms in the dictionary and one of them was "melt," so I took that and ran with it. I then thought of something that melted and the first thing that popped up in my head was ice cream. I wanted to use this somehow since children love ice cream! So in the end I came up with this:

"A maggot is the bloated fingers of a dead child that melts away the ice cream."

My Response:

I actually really like this way of thinking about a maggot. I like it because it made me think. It probably made me think more than I needed to about why these bloated fingers melted away ice cream.  I like the bloated fingers of a dead child because it puts this image of a white, overly puffy set of fingers in your mind. Which, does remind of you of a maggot because they are bloated and white. Secondly, I like the melting away of ice cream part because I had to think about what she meant by it. I didn't understand how dead fingers could melt away ice cream. Then, I realized that the fingers, aka maggot, would have to be warmer than the ice cream it was melting. Therefore, the temperature had to be warmer in the dead fingers.  The maggot, still being alive, is warmer and more alive than the bones it's eating upon. Again, it probably wasn't as complicated as I was making it, but I liked how she thought of two things that I would have NEVER thought about putting together.

I put this response on Kelsey's wall; however, I don't see it now. I don't know what happened.