An Ode to My Infinite Wisdom

I’ve got a short one for you all today.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s one of the four cities that show up on a map of Tennessee, and it’s by far the best. Knox is a really nice place, all things considered; we’ve got a pretty active downtown, decent enough greenways, and a close proximity to a killer national park. One thing Knoxville doesn’t have going for it, however, is its water quality.

According to Knoxnews (click above), East TN water often contains FDA-regulated safe levels of carcinogens, but those levels are pretty often double the national average, just so you know.

Knox water is fine enough for most purposes, and probably safe enough, but it contains a pretty hefty amount of chlorine. Like, I could fill a neighborhood pool with my kitchen sink and the only complaints would probably come from my roommates who need access to the sink in order to not do their dishes. Growing up in an upper middle class household, I always had access to one of those fancy fridges with the water dispenser built into the door. This liberated my child-self from the slings and arrows of having to drink a kinda soapy-ish flavored water growing up. It also likely protected me from all sorts of micro-organisms that could probably have killed me, or at the very least, had absolutely no effect on my bodily health.

Last August, however, I moved to a new place with a decidedly water filter-free fridge, but that wasn’t really an issue because my roommate Joseph brought with him a Brita pitcher. So for the past five months or so I’ve been drinking water filtered through said pitcher, and just today it occurred to me that changing water filters is generally connected to better performance of Brita pitchers. So imagine my surprise when, after taking my Brita apart like John Wick does a gun, I found that there was no. Filter. In. The. Brita.

Yep, I guess it never occurred to any of us to actually make sure there was a filter in our water filter. I’m not really sure the thought process of someone who buys a Brita pitcher, tosses the actual filter part, then goes on with their life.

The good news? The chlorine taste was all in my head. The bad news? I had to buy filters for like $15.