Asparagus Hires a Gardener

I think I will hire a gardener. Yes, as in someone to mow my lawn.

Last summer, as you will recall, I had the noble intention of keeping my entire lawn neat with a $29.99 electric weed whacker. Well...three spools of plastic thread later, I think I need a new strategy.

I could buy a lawn mower. This would be more practical than the weed whacker, but I would prefer to get out of yard work completely. Planting vegetables and flowers has a nurturing, genteel, Mother Earth aura to it. But in the United States we are not penalized for failing to plant gardens. We are penalized for failing to mow lawns. But when I mow, I can hear the wildflowers cry. Lawn mowers are essentially "automated, resource-depleting, pointless cow[s]. The suburbs may look verdant, but they are to residential areas what factory farms are to agriculture - monocultures - green deserts.

It may be hypocrisy, but I'd rather pay someone else to destroy nature. We pay people to butcher our animals (well, I don't), pick up our garbage, and bury our dead, so why not mow our lawns? Yet this offends my Rosie-the-Riveter feminism and my working-class sense of independence.

To assuage my guilt, let's do a financial analysis:

Mowing myself:
$200 - lawn mower
$400 - time and misery of mowing ($20/hour X 20 times/year)
$? - hidden costs (gas, repairing lawn mower, medical costs of losing fingers and toes, etc).
$600? - total

Paying someone else:
$500 - ($25/every time mowed X 20 times/year)
$500 - total

Mowing my lawn is worth at least 20 dollars an hour in misery to me, probably more. As you can see, this added to the initial cost of the lawn mower would make mowing my own lawn more expensive than having someone else do it this year. Even next year, surely the hidden costs (at least gas) would exceed the $5 an hour over the misery factor that I'm paying someone else to do it. Does that make since? It doesn't matter - I feel better now. Outsourcing rocks.