After asking for months or years for her to stop making me raise my voice and yell back, I started responding in a shitty tone like “WHAT?? WTF DO YOU WANT” which is a negative thing to have to do. But that had no effect either, other than perhaps a negative one on me psychologically.
Not saying this is a cool thing to do or a conscious decision, it was just driving me really fucking insane to ask her to stop 5 times a day for over a year and she kept doing it. So she’s either totally oblivious, didn’t give a fuck that it was frustrating me, or it was intentional.
That’s actually what i told my GF. I tried to get her to start calling me on the phone or facetime, which is ridiculous, but I mean she could just walk over and talk to me in person too…
my recent ex would just yell at me from 3 rooms away. I’d be forced to yell back “what??” and then half the time she wouldn’t say anything. So I’d get up and walk over there and ask “what??”. “oh, nothing, I wanted you to see this thing on TV”. I’d ask that she could please walk over and talk to me directly so I didn’t have to yell or get up and it would never happen.
It seems to be something that retired people love, to keep them active and give them something to do (a sense of purpose besides grandchildren?). I don’t mind yardwork myself, but I don’t feel like it’s virtuous or something. I also understand that a chemical-sodden monoculture isn’t really the best for humans and wildlife.
My mother used to try to get us… oh, she still does… to come “PULL WEEDS”. As kids it made sense, like okay, she wants us to get away from the video games and be outside and do whatever she’s saying, but at this point…
I think he thought he was doing me a favor, but really was just jerking off his lawn obsession. Same guy told me one time “HEY i saw a bear in your driveway and I was gonna come run it off so it didn’t mess with your garbage but it left!” I was uh, okay… no, please don’t come confront a bear in my driveway. Dude drank light beer all day.
I doubt that I could have demonstrated real harm, or even proved that he did it. I got back into town a week later and my brother, who had been watching the house, said “huh, the guy across the street mowed the front yard”.
My yard was very low with ground cover. I actually did mow the front, I just didn’t care if it was grass or a bunch of random other plants. I had a dog when my gf lived with me, but at this point, didn’t. There were so many rabbits and deer I actually just grew my vegetable garden on the front porch in containers.
Low height ground cover type plants grew naturally there. Clover, alfalfa, strawberries, unknown other plants, with an occasional thistle. Larger plants (whatever they were) would grow on the periphery. When he mowed my lawn it was maybe about a foot high.
We were surrounded by acres of forest where plants grew wild, so if there was a problem with pollen, it wasn’t the .4 acres of my front lawn. Myt front lawn, I did mow occasionally. The back I let grow wild and yes, one could still walk through it.
One of the lame things about lawn is that people don’t let them go to seed. If grass goes to seed, it not only regenerates itself, but also provides food for birds and squirrels. I was on an acre and a half across the street from this guy, and bounded by 30 feet of trees on ones side and 200 feet of forest on the other.
I find grass so useless. Every boomer parent I’ve known is just obsessed with it, too. They think that not having a green, green monoculture lawn means you’ve failed morally or something, and that it’s how they show the neighborhood how responsible they are. One GF’s dad came over to our random Winconsin lawn of grass and weeds and strawberries and was “I WOULD JUST PULL THIS ALL UP AND START OVER”. Uh… no?
Then I had an across the street neighbor (guy with a bumper sticker “I’ve never seen a FLAG burned at a GUN SHOW”) who would mow his lawn every single day with a riding mower. You couldn’t even tell what part he had done yet. I went out of town for two weeks and he rode over and mowed my lawn. I left my backyard just go and it was awesome… after a few years, birds started nesting in the middle of the prairie, and I had flowers growing I’d never seen anywhere else.