Anthony's bio

I presume that this is the right spot to blog. Yeehaw, I've only blogged one other time in my life for Intro to Political Science on Opera.com. It was actually quite a good experience, as I got a chance to apply reasoning to all sorts lof current events and class readings, as well as attempt to scorch other people's arguments. Not bad.

Anyhow, my name is Anthony Joyce and I currently work at the Belk Library Circulation Desk. I am a checkout monkey; I give you books, take your books, scan them into or out of your possession, manage the torture that are rental laptops, and organize hordes of books in the back. This is not the only job I've held, but it certainly is the longest lasting (probably due to the fact it is a state job, and thus hard to get fired or replaced. Efficiency is not the operative word in state institutions. Just look at Syria.) I've had disparate other jobs, including a high school spat with bagging at Harris Teeter, checkout monkey at Kerr Drug, and pseudo-barista/advice-giver at a student bookstore called Higher Grounds at UNC.

My purported life aim thus far is to travel as far and wide as possible, with an emphasis on the region we call the Middle East, from Morocco in West Africa to Iran in the East. I've traveled a bit already, most memorably to Israel and Egypt in 2000, during the New Intifadah. That was probably the trip that set the gears turning in my head towards becoming a Middle East "specialist". I've also been around Europe alone for five weeks during my year off from high school, and then went to Yaroslavl, Russia for three months doing volunteer work in orphanages. It was really, really cold.

I'm a Middle Eastern Studies major, despite the fact that no such thing exists here at App. I've focused primarily on political science courses taught by Curtis Ryan, a guru in the ways of comparative politics. Prior to declaring (which was only 6 months ago, three years into college) I applied the "shotgun" approach to classes; take whatever-the-hell and see what sticks. I tried out photography, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and sociology, but never felt compelled to devote myself exclusively to any of them.

What stuck was an intermixture of political science, history, political philosophy, religion, and other fancy sounding disicplines or subsets of. My concentration will be applied abroad; I'm going to Egypt to the American University of Cairo in September. I'll be learning Arabic and hopefully recieving a wider range of coursework to my liking, and attempting to develop more in-depth knowledge of the region. Gotta get the facts straight before you can really call yourself anything more than a curious layperson, though there is no shame there.

I'll be at the AUC for a year, then onto either grad school, the Peace Corp, or the US Foreign Service, which I essentially plan to use for my own academic and intellectual ends, hopefully doing my part to undermine the contrarily ideological and grossly hypocritical foreign policy we have been pursuing in the region for the past 50 years or so. The worst part about any ideology is the extent to which its proponents will always "make exception" to their values in certain cases. Nothing wrong with promoting democracy, but for god sakes, look at Saudi Arabia! We don't make a bloody peep about human rights or elections to them. And it certainly isn't as if the citizens of Middle Eastern nations don't notice this disparity. Sigh. Anyhow, hope you enjoyed my ravings and I look forward to class with all.
Anthony