the house where we live now, and where we've lived for the seven years since we moved to Portland, is the first house where i've really had to care about the lawn. our last house before we left Bloomington had a lawn, but we didn't actually use it because there was no fence for Miso and there were tons of bugs and the grass was so patchy and sparse that i really only had to cut it a few times a year, with a rickety gas mower the landlord had left in the garage.

we moved to Portland in peak summer and as someone who had only visited for a weekend once in the winter before we shipped our life halfway across the country, it was strange as we walked through our new neighborhood in this city known for its rain to see the grass in people's yards, which was largely bleached out and dead to a degree that reminded of some kind of apocalyptic incident (we had just watched Chernobyl). after living here for a while, i came to suppose that this has something to do with how much it rains here in the winter; the grasses selected for our yards are used to such a high volume of water that in the summer heat they're too thirsty to thrive without regular watering (looking this up, i learned it’s called “summer dormancy”; plants, they’re just like us!).

we got through the first fall and winter, but when the next spring came, our grass was out of control. in one corner of the spiderwebbed garage of the new house there was a corded electric mower, a type of thing i did not even know existed, but it was broken. in this new bluer state, it seemed gauche to buy a gas mower, and anyway i have always deeply hated the sound of the internal combustion engine so i was happy to be rid of it. what would have been the sensible choice at this time would have been to buy a reasonably priced cordless electric mower. what i did instead was get a manual push mower, which i forgot i had written about previously until i was checking whether i had already used the title "lawnmower man" for a letter and found this, from April 7, 2020, the summer when our lawn suddenly became a much more important place because, in the pandemic, it was the one place we could hang out with our friends:

i'm thankful that because of the lack of sun in the winter, the grass in our yard stays at a reasonable length and is also green, which has been a lovely contrast after years of desaturated midwestern winters and has also been helpful on a practical level because the lawnmower that came with the house was broken and the kid who mowed the lawn in the fall hasn't been around and i don't actually want to interact with my neighbors (and now that's culturally appropriate, bless), 

and i'm thankful that spring is coming now, it's going to get up above seventy on thursday and thanks to the sun lately, the yard has gotten very shaggy and overgrown, full of weeds and dandelions, and i have been putting off researching what lawnmower to buy because that has seemed like the least interesting thing in the fucking world to me (and there are a lot of things i do not think are interesting)

and i was torn between the gas mowers that have been a fixture of my life since i was a child but never really liked, i remember badly mowing our yard when i was a surly teenager because i couldn't see the lines where i'd mowed very well and my dad would get annoyed with me because he is really anal about household chores in a way that i did not like as a youth and then grew to appreciate in its way when i lived with my parents after coming home from korea,

and then electric mowers, which i did not know existed, somehow i thought that a battery would not be powerful enough or something and yet that seems to be the kind that everybody has here, but something about the cords and the bags of them make them seem like big vacuums in a way that i find distasteful

and then manual push mowers, which initially appealed to me because they are cheap and though we are doing fine right now after a long period where i worried about our finances this feels like such a boring thing to spend money on and also i like not having to buy gasoline and charge something but then i read that push mowers aren't good for cutting long grass and articles that like recommend, if your grass is really long and you want to start cutting it with a push mower, hiring a service to mow it the first time and then doing it yourself after that and like the whole reason i am buying this mower is to reduce the number of people i have to interact with, i am not trying to add interactions here

and so, having read like three posts from the top 10 google search results for "push mower long grass" over the course of several minutes one day months ago, i crossed a border of "okay, i know i need to think about this more, but also i do not want to think about this any more at all, so let's repress it good, except only partially, because also always (no not always just often) there will be the ghost in the corner of my eye reminding me that i still have not made this lawnmower decision

and meanwhile the grass is growing and growing, nature, and i look at it out the bathroom window every day and see it getting longer and shaggier but also thinking, i do not really care about my relationships with my neighbors as long as they are not bad and the back yard is surrounded by a fence that no one can see and is this actually a problem i have to care about or can i just blissedly defer it forever

and anyway we're having a couple of people over on thursday when it is going to get above seventy in the evening and we don't have any chairs and i had proposed we could just sit on the grass on blankets (a very safe distance apart, never touching, they will bring their own beverages from home) and i started to look at the yard and feel like "oh shit, that's not good, gotta make that lawnmower decision"

and i'm thankful that what i finally did was i looked up a youtube video of "can you cut long grass with a manual mower" and of course there was a video for exactly that, probably multiple but i just shifted off the first item in the array and i watched the video of a man addressing the very specific question i had with the answer of "yes, you totally can, you just might have to make a few extra passes and push harder"

and as someone for whom the physical act of mowing is my favorite thing about it, beside, that was great, and suddenly all this decision paralysis weight was unlocked and dropped beside me and i'm thankful that the spasming of the global supply chain has supplanted amazon as the hegemonic owner of "hey, i want this thing now gimme it right now" since everything is next thursday at best and i'm thankful that i bought a push mower from home depot with next day delivery and i'm thankful i managed to put it together, even though i fucked that up at first, and i'm thankful that yesterday evening i mowed our back yard and it was a pleasure and it looks so much better now

i'm thankful that d and i stepped outside to see the moon (well, thankful that i stepped outside to take down the recycling and compost bins she had filled earlier to the street and she stepped outside to see the moon) and when i turned back toward the house i saw that there were a lot of stars and we stood there looking up at the stars for a little bit in the cool breeze with bare arms before going back inside.

we think of technology existing to accomplish work with less labor (i mean that's not how it actually works in society, but in the like utopian Keynes’s grandchildren sense?) but at the time, i kind of liked the idea that the push mower required me to put more of my body’s power into it. not out of any virtuous reason like i am saving the world by using my own muscles but more practically because my brain chemistry requires me to get some kind of vigorous exercise every day or i become an irritable asshole who feels even more horrible in my own body than i normally do, and, as i age, i find that i have less pure love for running, my OG exercise. so the idea that my mowing the yard could be strenuous enough to also complete the day’s exertion requirement seemed perfect, a classic two-birds-one-stone type situation.

i lived in denial for a while but soon enough i couldn’t get away from the fact that the push mower was deeply annoying to use. i would wait too long to mow the grass, then it would get too high, then i would have to take a long time doing many laborious passes over the yard to get an even cut. then, over time, as the blades dulled and i did not summon the executive function to get an appointment for them to be sharpened or the mechanical ingenuity to sharpen them myself, i found that even doing those multiple laborious passes wouldn’t actually lead to the tidy yard that was the whole point of this work. so then, when i was done mowing, i would have to take a string trimmer (a device i hated even more than the push mower, since threading the plastic string into it is a task that would bring me to frustrated swearing every time even after watching like 20 youtube videos to try to get better at it), not just for cleaning up the edges but to basically go over the entire yard again evening things out spot by spot. at a certain point, i was like “this is so inefficient” and so i came to my senses and bought a new lawnmower just stopped using the mower for most of the yard and started doing almost everything with the trimmer, which was even more unergonomic and unpleasant and time-consuming.

i worked in technical support for big complex apps for years before i became an engineer. when you’re on a support team and constantly being faced with the limitations and flaws of the product you support, in an ideal world, you pass that information along to the product team responsible, which then prioritizes the work and gets it to an engineer who fixes it in a reasonable amount of time, then notifies you so you can then close the loop with the customer to tell them it’s resolved. in the real world, you pass that information along to the product team responsible and then, despite the best intentions of everyone involved, most of the time nothing happens and you get used to either accepting the limitation or flaw of the product or finding some way, often ungainly and inelegant, to work around it and solve the customer’s problem as best you can.

workarounds are not ideal as a solution to customer problems because they’re brittle (the great workaround you came up today that a customer will start to depend on with may be invisibly broken in a month by what seems like a completely unrelated change to the app) and because they don’t improve the quality of the app (if one customer is facing a problem with the app, they’re probably not the only one, and so even if your workaround fixes things for them, the problem will continue to hit other people, many of whom may just suffer in silence or, worse, churn).

so, i can hold in one hand that workarounds are imperfect and on the other hand they are often necessary, because, especially for a big app, prioritization has to be utilitarian; it sucks that this one customer is experiencing this bug, but the impact of stopping what we’re working on to help them has to be outweighed by the problems that are affecting more people (unless it’s a really small problem and/or a really big customer). i’ve seen various approaches to trying to solve this and maybe AI will one day be the thing that will kill the workaround but for now i don’t think we’re anywhere near getting past the need for them.

which, to be honest, i’m totally fine with because i’m stupidly good at solving problems by finding workarounds and then (emphasis on the “stupidly”) about getting used to them and not even thinking of them as workarounds, but just the way things are.

a silly example of a workaround in my own life is the era of MacBook Pros that had terrible butterfly keyboards with keys that broke very easily. the r key on mine broke less than a year into owning it and the correct thing to do would have been to send in the computer for maintenance and work off a loaner for a few days. i found the idea of this intolerable because i was a freak about my productivity (it’s telling i broke the r key, which was the keyboard shortcut for starting a new customer reply in our customer support software) and the thought of the disruption involved was something i didn’t want to deal with. but also, i needed to be able to type the letter r, which is a very important letter!

so what i did was send in the computer for maintenance and work off a loaner for a few days find an app that i could use to disable the internal keyboard of my laptop if an external keyboard was connected, then stacked a Magic Keyboard right on top of the disabled internal keyboard of my laptop and connected that with bluetooth. this was the way I used my computer for like 3 years, which is objectively ridiculous but which i didn’t think about much at all (i needed the ability to type on my computer and i had that ability) until i coworked at a cafe or at a company retreat and people couldn’t get over the ridiculousness of it. a nicer story about those same faulty keyboards is that i had a coworker who was finding that her keyboard’s space bar would type an irregular number of spaces when she pressed it, which was making it so she had to do annoying manual cleanup on every reply she sent to our customers. I wrote her a bookmarklet that, when clicked, reached into the editor window in our support software and replaced all instances of multiple spaces with a single space. it wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing.

she got her computer fixed quickly enough because she was a normal person. i am not a normal person and i generally don’t care if i’m doing things the normal way. instead, when i hit a point of friction, i find my way through it as efficiently as i can, then move on with my life, for better or worse. as i mentioned earlier, i deeply hated changing the string in my string trimmer. so, to work around it, i just stopped using the string head altogether and used the head with a permanent metal blade on it, which i think is intended for more hardcore brush clearance, but also seemed to do the job i wanted it for fine.

i’m speaking proudly about my skills at working around, and i am proud of them, but the point of writing this is to remind myself that sometimes they are hurting me more than helping me and things don’t have to always be that way. last summer, i decided i simply couldn’t deal with it anymore and bought a cheap electric lawnmower and…it was amazing. i can finish our front yard and back yard on one battery charge if i’m quick, and i am quick because it cuts the grass correctly the first time i do it. i can easily adjust the height of the blades for the different grass setups in the front yard and back yard. i barely have to do any trimming or edging at all because i can also just run over weeds and growth i would have had to trim in the past and the motor chews them up effortlessly, mulching into a bag that i can conveniently empty into the compost.

this is all nice, but it’s stupid that i only made the change after five years of a bad experience, because i was so accustomed to accepting the workaround as a given. for whatever the manual lawnmower is in your life, i pray that you find a workaround you can accept or, even better, a solution you can love: there’s room for both.

Elsewhere

• Israel continues bulldozing olive trees in the West Bank, bombing desalination plants in Gaza, and shooting at children trying to collect water

• The current state of robotic lawnmowers

• The best joke about climate change you’ll hear today

• Karabiner Elements is the app I used back in the day to work around my broken keyboard. The UI isn’t great but it exists, it works, and it’s free.