"thoughts" and "concerns"

I'm flying to Hanoi tomorrow. This is exciting and emancipating. It feels like life is normal again and I'm no longer the reluctant subject of the state apparatus etc. etc.

Anyway I'm currently reading this Nicholas Tarling book on Nationalism in SEA and it's bringing me back to the stuffy theatrette and the badly designed foldable tables. There are fond memories and there are less-fond memories, and in this bizarre mental flurry of time and reminiscing, I realise with much horror that my SATs are in two months' time and I haven't done a full paper yet. Therefore I suck at being Asian.  I will obviously fail the writing section because the examiners are going to resurrect David Foster Wallace and he will dissect every sentence I write and mock its terrible non-native speaker grammar, and then I'll feel wronged, insecure and disillusioned once more. This will be the emotional fuel for my memoir, a slim volume of recollections that will be published posthumously, in the year 2300, in a Chinese archeology monograph about folk writing among the urban underclass. 

Additionally, this insecurity is compounded by the recent questioning of the utility of my weird academic interests. Cultural anthropology? Comparative literature? Historiography? I'm surrounded by healthcare professionals dedicated to the lives of other human beings, so knowledge concerning the plurality of definitions in the study of nationalism, or describing the unity of form, content and tone in a sonnet, seems to be much of a trivial and selfish preoccupation. The narcissism of language games, the destructive acts of framing and re-framing real human problems into abstract and abstruse theory, the active complicity between language, knowledge and sources of oppression... I realize that everything I love is also everything that I condemn. 

I don't know how I'm going to reconcile these dissonant polarities. How do people in ivory towers connect with "those on the ground"? I think the very phrase "those on the ground" necessarily frames and re-enforces a vertical relationship that will continue to stay vertical unless a deeply horizontal relationship is established and sustained. Can one really take an interest in the "expressions of humanity" without firstly taking an interest in what's primal and fundamental in sustaining these "expressions"? Does anyone feel this way too?