So the year is almost over, and as with most years, I had a bunch of big plans for all the things I was going to do and change and accomplish for 2011. I don’t even much bother with the “lose five or ten pounds” one anymore, which I delude myself into thinking I’m above worrying about. But I do make highfalutin goals, somewhat loosely, and do I keep them? Well, let’s take inventory, mmkay? Here’s what I said I’d do that I di’int:

–Start volunteering for some charity or other (this one has been hanging around teasing me for years now, me with my delusions that I’m like this big socially conscious person or something, and it really got kicked into high gear when Obama got elected and decreed that we all should do so, and I was so jazzed by him and this proclamation in particular that I knew that 2008 would be The Year I Finally Really Did It, but no, I di’int, not in 2008 or 2009 or 2010 or 2011, even though I still really really for sure plan to, really for sure.) Not really winning any philanthropic awards, at least not for 2011.

–Write one sentence every night in a journal. One sentence! I used to write constantly every night, pages and pages, when I lived alone, but whenever I would be in a relationship (the sleepover kind), that would scale way way back since bedtime used to be the time I’d really spill the words. Now I live with someone full time and yeah, the journal can go years between one entry and the next despite the big intentions. Years. To combat this inertia, one of my BFs and I made a pact (in, like, 2009) that we would just write ONE SENTENCE at the end of every day. One sentence! Since then, I’ve done that around twice, and probably not since 2010. Empty pages. Broken dreams.

–Read more for pleasure. I have gotten SLIGHTLY better about this, but barely. In my defense, I read for homework almost every night until I pass out from fatigue with drool on my book, and only between semesters can I cram in the emergency pleasure reading that’s been piling up all semester (for example, since I turned in my grades on Dec 20, I’ve read five novels). But I always intend to keep it steady all through the year, even if it’s only a chapter or so per day. Haven’t done it, not so much. The Great Gatsby, though? Yep, totally read it again. Jimmy Gatz? Dies in the end, surprisingly enough. My personal reading goals? Also floating face down on a punctured air mattress in a pool that was supposed to be drained for the autumn.

–Be less negative about the American political world, cause otherwise, I’ll have an aneurysm. I have tried to pull back from this a little bit and have succeeded maybe negligibly, but in general, no I di’int. You bring up the Tea Party and I’m screamin’ “SERENITY NOW.”

–Listen to more new music. How sad! That I have to try to resolve to do what was once the greatest pleasure in my life, and which now is so difficult for me because I can’t work while doing it. So again, no I di’int. You’re coming over? Hope you like REM.

–Learn how to actually cook something instead of just wanting to go out for sushi every night. Figure out how putting things together in the kitchen can be creative and fun instead of stressful and overwhelming. No I di’int. Thank god, or I guess Ganesh, for Trader Joe’s premade Indian food.

–Take up an instrument, probably the piano again, by getting a keyboard that’s accessible full time in my house. Nope. The neighbors? Totally not disturbed by my incessant practicing.

–Paint stuff. Make art. Be creative. I love the idea, but I think I’m realizing the hard truth that I’m not all that idea-driven. Lots of lovely art supplies. Not much art, unless a page full of stars and partridges that I doodled while on hold with Wells Fargo counts. (They’re kind of good, actually, if you really want to know.)

–Leave the country. I do this most years, being quite stir crazy, but this year, other than an evening in Victoria that I can’t possibly count despite the passport stamp, no I di’int. The passport expires in 2013, and if that was its last stamp, I’ll eat my fanny pack.

–See or call those friends that I love so, so much and really want to make more time to see or call. Nope. Too busy, too tired, really, just too lame. I’m gonna be a lonely old lady if I let my core relationships slide. What the hell, though–maybe then I can find time to write ONE SENTENCE in my journal. It’ll be worth it, for sure.

–Deal with the fact that my house is about to fall down from termite damage. Sorry, I totally can’t deal with this. Opposed to tenting. Keep planning to research other options even though I know they’re all crap. No I di’int. Tra la la; let’s ignore this one altogether.

Okay, this entire post is pretty sad. So many good intentions. Even more that I haven’t detailed here. Plus smaller ones: stay off the Internet, go to more gym classes, walk my dog more. No, no I di’int, but I really do intend to. And I did do some things that were responsible and necessary. Got a new car—boring, taxing, but I did it (and I honestly meant to sell the old one, but I’m just really attached to it and so far, okay, no I di’int). BUT: Called my folks more. Strengthened my relationships with my nieces and nephews a little. Threw a few things away. Ate even less meat than usual (it’s only been a few times this year, mostly this past week, and I’m done now). Ate no lobster at all and very little crab. Bought more cruelty free stuff. Was more patient with students. Behaved less passive-aggressively (wait, what? I totally never did this in the first place). Used fewer paper towels–can YOU say the same?

But all those bigger and better and more world-improving plans, they haven’t yet materialized. What does it take, people? Help me out here. Or if you can’t, then at least chime in: what are your unresolved resolutions? And how can we do better in 2012? Or if we can’t do better, can we at least agree that we’re already pretty darn good already?

A loud buzz signals that the metallic hammering is about to begin, a technological blacksmith pounding my molecules against an electronic anvil. The noises vary in pitch and length, long patterns that hold for a while and then change, slamming against the giant red noise-canceling headphones that can’t keep out the aural onslaught. But the sounds make patterns, comforting in their regularity, engaging in their changes.

First, the intro to MIA’s “Paper Planes” seems to be playing, but the chord change never comes and I settle into its sameness for a while. Then I imagine the sounds to be a big long Philip Glass opus, like the score for Koyaanisqatsi; I imagine the landscapes and urban decay and people mobs of those images set to the clinks of the MRI machine. I think of Bang on a Can, Aphex Twin. I remember the movie Altered States.

I imagine that if an entirely spondaic line of poetry could exist, it would sound like this. The machine throbs. I think about those pod-bed “hotels” in Japanese airports. The pulse intensifies. I hear the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” when she imagines the mourners tromping, “treading—treading–” across her soul with “boots of lead.” The tempo shifts. The pitch increases. I am in a private space and my mind is meandering first to concrete comparisons and favorite people, then just abstractions, flashes of color and feelings of sound.

The technician interrupts on the loudspeaker every few minutes to let me know when another round of noises will begin, and I find that when the noises stop, I start to wish he wouldn’t say anything. I am sure he does so because most people find it comforting to hear the human voice, but I like the buzzes and beeps and the total retreat.

In between rounds, the technician reels me up to the surface and I find I don’t really want to go. He makes fun of me for looking away when he hooks the IV into my arm, and I object to this because I am really not freaking out; it’s just that no one actually likes to watch that jab, right? Or looks forward to it? It makes me want to dive back inside to escape his jollity.

Instead, since it’s not up to me when I glide back in, I ask the technician what makes the noises, and he says the sound is there to move the microelectrons in my bloodstream, to upset them so they register an image. A few minutes later, face down in the tube, I feel the cold contrast dye seeping sluggishly into my vein and settle in for the next song. And I can feel the electromagnets pulling on the fluids in my body like a lunar banshee of a moon-tide. My ear piercing vibrates under the headphones as the force of science tugs at it. But the itch stops soon and all that’s left is the hail of pure powerful sound.

I emerge from the tube with deep red grooves on my cheeks from lying face down on the face cradle. I absently mention that the music was good and he says oh boy, I’m worried now, she’s hallucinating, so I stop talking about it. Groggy and quiet after my time in the tube, I want to keep my thoughts to myself. I duck my head as I walk through the loud waiting room in hopes that my hair will hide the marks on my face, into the different sounds of a different atmosphere. I sort of miss the music.

Winning the TED prize has allowed JR to help fund these projects all around the world. Anyone can send in a portrait for public display; the project sends back giant posters of the photos for the public installation. I think the only stipulation is that it be a face.

We got to participate in part of this global art movement last weekend in Bastrop, Texas. Our photographer friend Leon had been enlisted to take portraits of the citizens who had lost their homes in the recent wildfires, and those who had helped them, to post on the corrugated-metal sides of a historic cotton seed mill that’s being restored and reappropriated as an art studio compound.

The Austin artist community and the Bastrop locals turned out to work on this project together. The crowd included a two-year-old whose two-fisted wielding of the wheatpaste brush resulted in a couple smacks in her own face with the brush; a fireman with a two-foot beard who had been one of the main respondents on the scene and whose portrait was featured in the montage; a vegan baker who supplied treats for the crowd; a videographer making a documentary about the process; a boy pulling a cooler of drinks through the dirt to refresh all the workers; a couple of tourists from California.

Everyone took a turn at spreading the wheatpaste; everyone climbed the ladder; everyone stood below with the long-handled roller; everyone pressed the posters’ edges in and out of the grooves of the corrugated surface, making sure the poster didn’t tear if pulled too tight across a concave groove. We smoothed out the wrinkles from the massive teeth and noses and faces before us, as people behind us on the ground called up to us to make adjustments we were too close to be able to discern.

Dirt in the wheatpaste, rocks holding the posters down in the wind, jackets in the dust, sun in our eyes, glue on our jeans. When it was all finished, the supersized citizens of Bastrop beamed down from their grooved surface onto the tiny, scrubby street below.

Hello, people!

Click here for more on JR.

Just outside the Quarter, Treme is recovering and looking proud:

But the Ninth Ward, where the levees broke (or were weakened to ensure they broke, say the locals, to spare that same French Quarter that fuels the city’s economy), still looks in most places like this.

The guy who drove me through these streets, who used to live there, said that these were all closely packed blocks of houses, with yards butting up against each other—blocks and blocks of this bustling populated suburb. Now most blocks have two or three houses on them, those that were salvageable or spared, with huge weedy lots in between where their neighbors’ houses used to be. I saw more rabbits than residents.

Some houses have been cleared by their owners (most of whom still own the land but haven’t been able to rebuild)—often all that’s left is a porch:

And sometimes the owners haven’t even had the resources—financial or perhaps emotional?—to clear away what’s left of their homes.

Speaking of spraypaint, many houses still bear the spraypainted instructions from FEMA, and sometimes to FEMA, about what–or who–is salvageable. This garage door was actually in a museum exhibit, which explains the inappropriately pretty backdrop for such a brutal memo:

New homes are beginning to be built on some of the vacant lots—like the houses that still stand, they’re about six or seven lots apart from each other, as if they’re big estates on acres of land instead of lonely islands in the middle of a wiped-out neighborhood. They were funded by some sort of grant that provided modernized dwellings, sustainable and up on stilts in hopes that they’ll withstand the next inevitable flood. I was unable to find out whether these are the ones Brad Pitt commissioned and funded, but they do look much more LA than NOLA.

I’m not gonna be the one to critique how out of place or “inauthentic” these houses look when they’re giving these residents somewhere to be after that trauma, maybe even somewhere nicer. Do they feel “at home” there? How can they, even if they grew up on that street or they love their new digs, when almost all of their former neighbors’ homes–and maybe the neighbors too–are washed away, collapsed, disappeared?

Waterstains were visible on buildings everywhere that hadn’t been repainted–you could see where the color turned dark and bubbled in a line all the way around the buildings. Many businesses had been rebuilt or had painted over those scars, but no one’s ready to pretend they’ve moved on completely, so they had indicators to show how high the water had risen, like this one:

Now look–look UP–at where that little plaque sits on the wall behind my friend.

The waterline plaques are just a hint of the survivors’ pride that infuses so many conversations. They’ve got STORIES. Everywhere we went, the locals would tell us what it was like to run from the storm. Not the hurricane, not Katrina. Just “The Stawm.” They’re not sick of talking about it. “We all piled in the car and it took us fourteen hours to get to Houston.” “My whole family used to live in this neighborhood, but now their houses are all gone.” “We salvaged the bar from the restaurant and built the rest back ourselves.” “Used to be lots more homeless here, but we figure most of’em died.” “My family got the last room at the Best Western and they charged us double. Twenty-one of us crammed into that room–and we stayed there for three weeks.” And those are just the stories tame enough to share with a stranger without crying.

I can’t end with a platitude about the resilience of the city, the way their music uplifts them, that unquenchable NOLA spirit. It’s too sickening. People are living their lives and their lives are changed. I just wanted to show you what I saw.

As if Katrina weren’t bad enough?