If you were an alien, what would you think of lawn care?

Summer's almost here, and I'm thinking that if I were an alien and my spaceship landed in any given suburban yard on a Saturday morning, I'd be really mystified. Based on my study of Earth (known in my language as x49-3-subsector *&^^/0) and the agrarian habits of its seemingly dominant species, the hairless ape that calls itself man, I'd think people were farming grass. That's what lawn care looks like to an alien species, you know.

And here's what would really confuse me: these crazy hairless apes nurture and grow the grass, invent machines to chop and harvest the grass, and then they throw the grass away! They don't eat it, they don't feed it to their livestock (in the suburbs), they don't burn it for fuel. They just bag it and throw it in a landfill. What kind of wacked-out lawn-farmers are they? It would make no sense at all to my alien mind.

Now that's weird, if you're an alien (or the wife of an obsessed lawn-farmer). But the truth is even weirder: we grow and nurture and obsess over the lawn for absolutely no profit to ourselves. We pour pesticides and fertilizer on it, we spend hours grooming it, we use up precious resources for it, with no end result whatsoever. Except that once every few years you're lucky enough to escape the grubs or the mice and have a nice carpet-like lawn that you don't want anybody to walk on and ruin.

I guess what makes us insane (lawn care) also makes us cool, though, because really it's all about our esthetic sense, and we're pretty unique that way. I can't think of another animal that spends so much time and energy on something just to be able to later sit back and look at it (from a distance, please--stay off the lawn).