What was I thinking?

I wonder why I have such a hard time writing on this thing. It is an interesting situation to have found myself in, to be trying to look at something that I thought I ought to know what to say about it before I even said it. What I mean to say is, though I don’t often know what my thesis is, I know how the paper is supposed to “look” by the time I turn it in. You have arguments and counter arguments and citations and criticism, and close reading and maybe some self-evaluation or critique. And I thought this would be a similar kind of exercise, and that at the end, I would be able to write a really good paper about it. I’m an English major. That’s what I’m supposed to know how to do. But here it is, three weeks til something is due, and at this point I don’t even know what paper I could write. I guess I have some books, and some scholarly articles, and some blogs, and this experience of not being able to write about them that I could then turn around and write about (?)…

I keep assuming and telling myself that I need to write a paper or something at the end, because I need to have a product, that is something more than rambling, nonsense, run-on sentences I’ve been infrequently posting on the internet. On my blog that no one reads. But after all that, it seems like the only reason that I would write a paper is because I can’t think of anything else. I am defeated by the post-sturcutralist postmodernist internet textual experience, and I must recede back into the ways of the academy and write an analytical, scholarly paper about it because that is all I know. That, and this blog. This blog writing that I have been slowly more able to do as I realize that in order to say anything about it I might end up saying something stupid... yet still not wanting to say something stupid. And not wanting it to be one of the stupid blogs that are only good for their engagement with textual space rather than their writing, because the writing is bad. It all comes back to the experience of shame and self-consciousness:
I don’t want the blog to be uninteresting or unintelligent.
I don’t want to be a miserable failure of an English major.
I don’t want my inability to write coherently and authoritatively about the on-line personal blogs to really be because I am lazy or stupid or not getting something.

What was I thinking? I keep going back and forth about feeling like a failure. I feel like I am just contributing to the fire hose of text that is coming out of the blogosphere. I don’t want to think that that is the only thing to be done with this project until I try something else. But why don’t I want that to be? Why is this kind of writing so much lower to me in responding to these things than writing a paper?