Kotmish, my beloved and only boyfriend, husband, friend and "crying wall", and I spent the weekend searching for nice sweet neighborhoods where we can move in after the contract of our apartment expires in a month - DC is an astronomically unbelievably expensive place - an average house costs $700 000, and well a million $!! This time, we are not buying a house-only renting one (and maybe we should move out of DC to more affordable and beautiful places!). We decided to rent a townhome because we like the feeling of privacy, and in my opinion even the best condo in the liveliest urban neighborhood can't compensate for the comfort of having a home with lots of windows, higher ceilings, Not to mention that we will have our own garage-well, over these deliberations we were of course startled to discover that condos are so expensive in the neighborhoods we wanted to move in (McLean), that we decided to go for townhomes which are slighly more expensive but offer ten time more convenience. We are planning to move to the area in DC that is considered residential, while Kotmish will probably continue to work in his old workplace. at one of the busiest corporate corners in the world- Tysons Corner. Excited, to move, I am !! (just Watched Star Wars and loved it)
Another major development is that I started taking my Environmental Public Governance class at George Mason - only after the first class did I realize that a class taken out of urgent necessity and with the assumption that it will not contribute anything significant to my world knowledge (picked the class randomly to register) can in fact be "quite interesting". Given the "environmental" policy of the US (or its lack), and the university being one of the nationally renowned ones "very close" to the national capital, one can have very interesting discussions indeed. The class consists of professionals seeking to improve their policy making skills-and me-the decorative plant who happens to be there by chance:). The first lesson I learned is that as a policy maker, facts are not relevant because they can be manipulated- environmental scientist are equally unreliable as the oil companies - so what is relevant is how you can shape the policy. This ordinary sentence gives us policy maker THE power, in fact, the only power... I am learning how to be Devil's Advocate.
EX:
Question:
"Is there global warming?"
Environmental Scientist: Yes, of course, what kind of a stupid question is this! Look at the data etc etc!
Oil companies: No, they can't prove it, they work to extend their contracts, obtain research money, and nobody has proven that global warming is happening. So let's not waste time.
Policy Maker: Well, hm, this is not the point, you see. Whether global warming is happening or not is irrelevant (beyond it is not even provable). What is the point is to move beyond this gridlock created by the disputable claims of environmental scientists and the equally disputable claims of the oil companies. So, lets move on to taking realistic actions like adapting, supporting developing nations with funds to educate them agains natural disasters. Etc....

This is on the "I talk for those who I am working for" qualities of the policymaker. The reason I was shocked initially was my belief that I will be taking an environmental class, but no, this is environmental policy and governance! But I also learned how dams destroyed whole Maya comunities, the twilight people of Irar, etc. This is on the "Environmental" aspect. I also learned lots of terms like environmental racism, glocalisation.
So far, I am loving it....