Snoqualmie

Sometimes it pays to ask.

Yesterday morning I looked up the menu of the restaurant to which I'd been invited for dinner, and promptly called Jacob to inform him that goddamnit, there was nothing there that I could eat, I'm sick of being suckered like this, is it so hard to either find a restaurant with one decent vegan option or let me stay home eating pea soup in antisocial peace? And Jacob calmly hung up the phone and called the restaurant to ask if they could make me some vegan options and they said yes, so I shuffled my feet and looked embarrassed and went to the restaurant after all. Once there I asked the waitress for a suggestion and was directed to a completely delicious plate of vegetables and lentils and appetizer salads and dips, and I was overwhelmingly glad that I'd asked.

I came in to work this morning in a sleepy but well-fed good mood, and noticed the bag of candy sitting on the office's center table. I picked through it for a few minutes and came up with a possible match for my candy needs: a handful of chewy Starburst candies. I pursued a don't-ask-don't-tell ingredients policy for long enough to eat three or four of them, and then, feeling magnanimous, decided to look online for an ingredients list. They're just fruit candies, I reasoned, what are they going to have in them, milk? Hardly. Nutrition information will vindicate me. So I looked up the ingredients and found myself staring glumly at the word "gelatin", sitting right there between dextrin and modified food starch while I sat there with another candy already unwrapped in my hand, and I wished I'd never bothered to find out.

What? I didn't say it always paid to ask.