I'm out here visiting my sister. From where I'm sitting as I write this I can see the Pacific Ocean stretching from here to Tomorrowland. If I were to take ten paces out the door to my right, I'd fall off a 20-foot cliff onto the beach. Literally. Got the picture? I'm writing from paradise where perfection is not only possible, it's routine; where the end of yet another 75-degrees-and-sunny perfect day is celebrated by the ceremony of the green flash, where the locals gather to stare directly into the impossibly huge orange ball that is the sun as it dips beneath the blue green Pacific vastness, where the people who live here are disappointed if the sunset doesn't reward them with a brief burst of green glow as the last itty bitty part of the sun disappears beneath the horizon. This place is so perfect there are no screens on the open windows because there are no mosquitoes or other blood-sucking bugs to bother your sleep. This place is so perfect that no one seemed to get upset when the mayor of San Diego shut down restaurants and told people to boil water before drinking it.

This actually happened here last weekend. On Saturday Aug. 5 the mayor announced that the water in a part of northeast San Diego was undrinkable because of high levels of E coli bacteria. In other words, there was poop in the water supply. The mayor ordered restaurants to close and advised citizens to boil tap water before drinking it. A day later, the mayor announced that it was OK to drink the water again. Everyone here in paradise seemed to take this annoucement in stride. The local newspaper covered the story matter of factly, centering on the announcement rather than the cause. The stories dealt with the way the information was disseminated rather than how the water was contaminated. A lot of people weren't even aware of the mayor's "boil your water" warning until after the fact. As of yesterday, it was still a mystery how poop got in the city's water supply. The story barely rated a mention the the Sunday paper.

Not being from paradise myself, I tried to imagine how we in Philadelphia would react if Mayor Street closed restaurants and told people to boil their drinking water because there was poop in it. I suggest that we would have gone out of our freakin' minds. I suggest that our city's news media would have been hanging off the mayor like a cheap suit, hounding him to explain where the poop came from, how it got in the drinking water, and who were the nitwits in the water department responsible. Out here in Lala Land, that story is not only last week's news, it barely registered on the average citizens' radar. My brother-in-law, who works as a civil engineer building sewers and culverts for the city of San Diego hadn't even heard about the mayor's "boil water" order when I asked him to explain how in god's name poop got in the drinking water. It wasn't his department, he told me. "That's water, I'm sewage."

If there's such a thing as being too laid back, I think San Diego may be guilty of it. This is a city nearly the size of, and soon to be larger than, the population of Philadelphia but the vibe is totally que sera, sera. The city government of San Diego is marbled with thieves and incompetents, not unlike a certain East Coast city we call home, but at least we still get upset. We demand answers. We show outrage. We don't call it Perfectdelphia, but we don't take it for granted, either. Perhaps it's possible for there to be too much of a good thing. Perhaps life in eternal sunshine effects the brain. Perhaps living in a city where it's buggy, hot and humid during the summer isn't so bad after all.