Collette Curran's Art Tracker

I suppose it's time for an update, eh? Every time I start a journal, I never keep up with it. Usually, it tends to start out fairly strong, then it slowly dwindles to a sad and pathetic nothing. Not unlike my life. (Nah, life is a charm).
So here's the update: no job yet. I can only blame myself and my permanent laziness and inactivity as far as applications go. No matter how hard I try, sitting and doing nothing does not get me employed. I guess all those TV cliches of peeps sitting, waiting and maybe even wishing by the phone requires a bit more than mental enthusiasm. Not that I mind a life completely summed up by a line of Jack Johnson lyrics.
I've done a bit of artin' and fartin' since the last I checked in here, so I'll just plop down everything I've got so far now:

This one here ^ is for a tournament over at deviantart. There are only 32 people chosen to be in the tournament out of about 250 character entries. If the character was interesting enough (and though it claimed to be an unbiased contest, I'm sure some drawing skills helped determine the winners), you were chosen to participate in the competition. Just getting in was a challenge enough in itself, but I found out about a week ago that I had made it in. WHOO! I pat myself on the back for that one - the other contestants were pretty tough.

I'm going to say this is about a year old. Needs some tweaks now that I'm looking back on it.

Um, I'm not really sure about this one. It was a request from a friend. I'm guessing it's some sort of inside joke... :-/ Crazy pigs.

Nothing much to say here. I plan to recolor this in warmer tones pretty soon. The fur was a bitch to do.

So that's all that's really been going on in the art realm. I enjoy doing this kind of art, but it's definitely not where I want to be heading as far as a career goes. I actually mostly did the last piece to promote what I can do for commissions, so I can earn me some monies. As much as I love and enjoy dragons, they aren't my life. But the y are for a LOT of people, and I'm hoping that I can earn a little cash illustrating for the real dragon-fanatics. Or even just drawing a simple character is what I notice a lot of people pay money for. Either way, it's good practice and I don't mind terribly doing those kinds of illustrations.
I just noticed that I'm kinda going off on a tangent with no real ending point. So I'll stop here. The End.

P.S. As far as the title goes, it's one of the songs from Cyne's new album coming out pretty soon. I'm really looking forward to it. :)

So this summer looks like it will provide a lot of opportunities to do fun and interesting things sure to give me a third degree burn by the time autumn rolls around. I’ve marked my mental calendar with plenty of dates to go to the beach and camping, the latter of which I plan to carry out with the least amount of supplies and only the bare essentials. I’m amazed with as infatuated as I am with stars and space and what-have-you that I have yet to have spent an actual night under the empty sky, especially one without a river of smog flowing up to fifty feet into the atmosphere.
I still haven’t found a job, but I can honestly blame that on my lack of effort. Summer hours, open as a bird’s choice of destination, would have been ideal to land me a part-time job somewhere serving coffee or selling books, but our week of family vacation time is right at the beginning of July, early enough so I don’t want to apply anywhere, but late enough for me to go crazy with this heat and nothing to do but bitch and moan (in a very non-sexy fashion mind you).
Most days I spend awake for nearly all of the morning of tomorrow. I aim bedtime around three o’clock, but the hour hand usually drifts one more number before I have all my fans set up and the windows open and sheets pulled off to the side in preparation for chasing down the Sandman.
Yesterday, a summer night (morning) like any other, I was up alone watching Dante’s Inferno on Ovation TV, which I would like to mention as a very interesting and comical satire/ parody of the old literature. While this was happening (and while I was trying to enjoy my Pad Thai), I noticed this very large and homely creature scurry across the clean, yellow wall behind the TV. I was quite literally shocked (I think my heart stopped for about five beats). Now I’m not your usual pussy; I catch snakes, cut up worms, pick up horse doody, but giant insects are not my favorite foe. I tend to call for help if six legs are involved, I might screech for it if there are eight.
Fortunately, this particular specimen had only six legs, but sheer size (plus a pair of very usable wings) made up for any lack of creepiness a spider would naturally fill in for a modest aracnaphobic such as myself. Though in doubt, I new for the short moment the bug crawled out across the wall, then fluttered through the air back behind the TV furniture, that it was a monstrous cockroach.
Now, I know cockroaches are supposed to be common and every household can have them and they can even be enjoyable company (yes, I watched Joe’s Apartment when I was younger), but I have never seen a cockroach in my house before. Never. And I would have once boasted that my house would never be subject to such vermin. This is no longer the case. We had a cockroach.
A big one.
This problem needed to be solved immediately. You see, there’s this innate human fear of the unknown, and such is why so many of us fear death and dark places and entrance exams. This applies to everything. If I didn’t take care of this beast now, he could be anywhere tomorrow night, and not being a betting type of girl, you wouldn’t catch me taking a chance that he wouldn’t be hiding in the crevices of the couch the next time I sat down to watch TV.
The information I had now was valuable, so I had to take this opportunity. Looking around for any blunt object, my eyes fell upon my stinky basketball shoes (crusty socks still inside) that I had thankfully refused to put away. Perfect. Not only would this roach go down, but he’d go down the putrid way.
Clutching my weapon in one hand and eating Pad Thai nervously with the other, my eyes trained upon the wall around the TV, waiting and missing the movie (thankfully I have TiVo). I waited a while, but not long. Soon he appeared again, crawling like a sinful sunspot on the bright yellow wall, legs scratchy and horrible, antennae long and lethal.
I snuck up on him from across the room, slowly taking pillows off one of the couches so I could reach him. Climbing up slowly, I watched the beast and his foul ways, grooming his antennae, shifting with utter confidence upon the spot. Reluctantly – these walls were recently painted and my mother slept on the other side – I raised my shoe.
I paused. Aimed.
He paused. Stared at me.
I felt my knees quiver on the leather couch. What a ferocious beast! With shining body armor and the likelihood of giant, slobbery fangs, it just looked.
WHAM!
I struck before I even knew I had. The shoe collided with incredible force, landing with a hollow thud against the wall. But there was no crunch. The roach had fallen down behind the furniture.
Crafty devil…
So back to waiting again. I could hardly hold my chopsticks, so I instead just sat there across the room, watching. Once again, the insect-gladiator showed itself, this time crawling out from the other side even higher. This time he was behind the birdcages next to the fireplace; the was no way for me to reach him. Instead I watched. He would be the one to make a mistake, I knew.
And he did. He flew.
At first I panicked. I used to laugh at my father for having a fear of grasshoppers because they have a tendency to fly in every which way, more than likely directly at you. I understood that fear last night, when the monster took to the skies of my living room and piloted his way haphazardly in my direction. I readied my shoe, but he didn’t come within range.
Instead he flew over me and across the hallway, toward the front door. I pushed my tray away and followed closely, but I lost him in the darkness. I stayed in complete silence and stillness, watching for a flutter in the darkness. None came, so I darted up the hall, turned on the hall light, then returned just as quick, hoping that the bug hadn’t moved. The art room door was open next to where I had last seen him. If he had gone in there, all hope would be lost. The art room is a more like a catastrophe room, even though it’s recently been cleaned out extensively. If the cockroach had found his way into there, he could easily have hid behind a million corners and in all sorts of dark spaces.
I continued to watch, my shoe above my head at ready. This would end tonight. He had made one mistake, now he just needed one more.
Finally, crawling from his refuge behind the umbrella-holder, the roach made his way out and along the seam between the door and the tile. I crept close, doing all I could not to startle it.
When I got close enough to see his ugly, sinister face, I paused. If I struck now, while he was so close at the seam between the door and tile, the shoe might catch and form a triangle over the roach, protecting him in the right angle of my fury. So I waited. At long last, the beast took two steps outward from the door, his giant prickly legs scratching horribly for purchase along the slippery ground.
CRACK!
Again, I struck without thinking. This time, something crunched under the shoe. Hells yeah. I did a victory dance, then took a picture.

This whole story is not the punch line that I am trying to get to. After wiping the sweat from my brow and my heart rate had returned to normal, I decided to show my mother what I had accomplished during her slumbers. I left the roach flattened to the floor and my shoe nearby to illustrate the scene, then left a note (as you can see in the photo). I left another note to my mother elsewhere in the house where she always looks before she leaves for work.
The next morning my mother woke me up to tell me what she had done. Apparently, she had spotted the shoe by the front door before she read the first note she was suppose to receive to lead her to the scene. She was going to remove it, but then thought that I might have left it there as a reminder to myself to go to the gym. Then she saw the cockroach, made even larger by his pancake-status. Not realizing the roach was dead, and taking this perfect opportunity with my shoe so nearby, my mother thwarted the bug again.
Then, when it didn’t move (or change shape for that matter) and she spotted the note, everything fell into place.
Oh mom, what would I do without you?

And you too, dad...