Two months ago, I considered blogging about how you really have to wash your Brita pitcher out now and then, since mine had grown a slight but eerie green slime when I wasn’t looking. But then, I discarded the idea because I found the whole affair disgusting.

More recently, I found that the problem wasn’t that I’d been negligent to wash the filtering pitcher, handy for taking that chlorine taste out of your drinking water. It was that I was leaving my water-purifying pitcher on our sunny kitchen window sill in hopes that the sun would somehow energize the pitcher’s contents. Any pet shop owner will tell you never to set up a fish tank in the sun. Same with the Brita. Water and sunshine breed algae, no matter how pure the water is. Who knew? Now you do!

It just goes to show that perfection can be the enemy of the good. That is, the quest for a glass of the most divine H2O can actually lead you to drink something worse than what you’d get from the city tap.