I had never heard of Fiona Apple until I went for some makeup lessons at M-A-C Cosmetics. I learned alot about how to do my makeup, and the added bonus was learning about Fiona Apple and her new Album, Extraordinary Machines. It is a very good album and it has meaning for many kinds of people. Two songs in particular, talk of the uniqueness of people and how amazing they either are or are becoming.

In the title track, “Extraordinary Machine” Fiona sings:

If there was a better way to go then it would find me

I can’t help the road just rolls out behind me

Be kind to me, or treat me mean

I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine

It’s a great line from a very well written, sung and produced song. And how many of us (trans or not) couldn’t identify with those verses. Coming to grips and hopefully at peace with our own lives, we may indeed come to the conclusion that if there was a better way to go, it would find you.

In “Better Version of Me” Fiona has some equally interesting lines:

I am likely to miss the main event

If I stop to cry or complain again

So I will keep a deliberate pace

Let the damned breeze dry my face

I won’t give away some other yummy tidbits from that song, but I think you’ll agree, when you listen, that it’s not just catchy, but it will give you pause to think as well. Maybe in your life and mine we’ll realize that stopping to cry and complain isn’t going to do anything, but keeping a deliberate pace moving forward will. Overall the album is well produced, it’s a joy to listen to. It is also uncommon music. What I mean by that is that it’s not the same top-40 watered down pap that you hear on the radio. It’s far better. With much more variety and excellent musical skills being demonstrated. And that not clinically, but richly with deep feeling. It’s really a joy to listen to.

Go pick up “Extraordinary Machines”, it’s a very good album, that is not only meaningful, but fun as well. At the end, you too may come to the conclusion that you are an Extraordinary Machine.

Having a near death experience with streptococcus got me thinking about alot of things. If such a small thing can so quickly destroy our health, what little things can so quickly help our health? Well there are a few that I used to consider unimportant, but now, I think they have alot of value and you might find this is true too. Each of these takes less than 5 minutes to do each (well except for one).

Flossing Your TeethI personally have real difficulty getting this to work for me. But, it’s tough for me to whine about this when flossing can reportedly add 6.4 years to your life! In fact, 21st Century Dental notes on their site some studies on flossing and health:

The best of these studies done at Emory University with the Centers for Disease Control, indicated that people with gingivitis and periodontitis have a mortality rate that is 23 percent to 46 percent higher than those who don’t… why? They are linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease and stroke, as well as to an increase in mortality from other causes, such as infections.

Taking care of your feet
Obviously, I have an appendage fetish (I wrote about hands last week here , now feet, what??) in any event…would you let your hands look like the bottom of your feet, provided you actually looked at the bottom of your feet? If you have big cracks and fissures in your feet, going to the local drug store to buy some off the shelf anti-athlete’s food medicine isn’t likely to really fix the problem. Your probably going to need a prescription drug like Lamisil to really clear up the infection. Then you need to make your feet pretty – no ugly cracks and callouses! I’ve been using a foot emery board (also known as fine grit sand paper mounted to a stick) and Burt Bee’s Coconut foot creme. Vaseline works pretty well too, and is alot cheaper.

Washing your hands
We covered this one pretty well when I posted on hand washing at this link here. Suffice to say, wash ‘em!

Sleep
This is a toughie isn’t it? Of all the things you can do, this one is probably at the top of the list of important things but at the bottom of what we really do. Why is that? Guilt (“Oh no I’m actually resting!”), too big a todo list stealing hours when we should be resting, other more exciting things to do (like eating chocolate).

There is so much data on the benefits of a good nights sleep it’s hard to believe most of us simply don’t do it. To quote Dr. Ellington Darden in a chapter on sleep and recovery from exercise, from his excellent book, “A Flat Stomach ASAP“:

Your body is a complex factory that is constantly making hundreds of delicate changes to transform food and oxygen into many chemicals required by various parts of the system. But there is a limit to the chemical conversions that your recovery ability can make within a given time. If your requirements exceed the limit, your body will eventually be overwork to the point of collapse.

Important to note if you fall asleep while driving. Some states are trying to put accidents caused by drivers who fall asleep into the same category as accidents caused by the driver being drunk.

You can find reams of information on sleeping on the net, most of it accurate (click to this Yahoo search link for a few of them here). But let me just highlight a few points (from page 67, “A Flat Stomach ASAP”, and the APA)

• Sleeping in 90 minute increments is best. That’s a complete sleep cycle in which your body goes through normal sleep, rem sleep, and then normal sleep again. Practically, this means 7.5 hours of sleep will be better for you than 8 or 7 due to it being six 90 minute cycles

• Having trouble figuring out complex issues? Sleep on it. That’s when your brain works out complex problems. Your much more likely to have the solution in the morning Can’t sleep because of the complex issue keeping you awake? Don’t take a shot of whiskey! Instead, write the problem out on a piece of paper, sort of placing it to the side in a sense.

• Do you have a few pounds to shed before lounging at the beach this Summer? Sleepers (those with 7 hours or more on their pillow) are much more able to control their appetite and as a result their eating. While those who sleep 6 hours or less put their bodies under stress. The body responds many times by craving carbohydrates (can you say a whole bag of Oreo’s!!)

Fish Oil
No you won’t grow fins, scales and crave krill. BUT you will have healthier skin and hair, strengthen your immune system and reduce your risk of both cancer and heart disease! Wow, now that sounds fishy doesn’t it? Well fish oil will do that for you. It’s so proven that the American Heart Association recommends it (see info here). BUT (there’s alway a but buttin’ in…) Most fish are spoiled with mercury, so it’s wise to consider a supplement that actually screens that out. There are two that I know of, there are probably alot more. One is Carlson’s Brand Fish Oil and the other is from the Stop Aging Now website (note, Beck’s Cafe gets no reimbursement for pointing you to those links, we just want to be nice to you ).

So, to ward off some of the little nasties that can fell you, try the little giants to get health on your side.

Hi and welcome to the new home for Beck’s Cafe We’ve moved here from Typepad, where the URL was http://beckscafe.typepad.com. The Typepad site will degrade over time and then disappear in July.

We are here using our own little copy of WordPress and selfhosting at A Small Orange. Thank You’s are due to the template’s original designer Andreas Viklund which was Ported by Ainslie Johnson. To make it work for Beck’s Cafe I had to put some love into it of course!

*just a little p.s.* All links, categories and archives have been copied from the Typepad site to this new blog. So if you have a favorite article you bookmarked, you might want to consider changing the bookmark to reflect the permalinks from our new site.

So I've moved all my links and archives from Typepad and we are ready to serve up the writing (sometimes hot and fresh, othertimes cold and ick).

You can visit the new Beck's Cafe by clicking to this link here.

Thanks for stopping by

Okay quick question – how many of you brainstorm best when your (a) hunched in front of your computer (b) in a room with a whiteboard and markers or someplace quiet like a library with a pad of paper and pencils?

If you answered (b) your taking a low tech approach and that may be a key to doing better and thinking smarter when you need a breakthrough. Jeanne Sessum over at Blogher wrote about this at this link here, and the original article was posted at Working Solo, which you can read here.

The thoughts they share on using low tech to make a breakthrough is worth giving serious consideration too. In fact, when working out this blog, I used *gasp* PAPER and PENCIL to outline:
* layout
* my publishing schedule (YOU have a publishing schedule Becki? uh Huh *cough* a loosely defined one)
* And how I wanted the flow to feel.

And I’m doing the same on my next blog too (ahh if only php and html were that simple!…)

And for stuff that people actually pay me money for (read: work) I use a HUGE white board (the size of a wall actually) to draw and make lines and arrows…because when you sit back and see the big picture you can actually think about the problem at a high and more integrated level. This is very important to solve a host of issues in your job – and in life. Going low tech allows you to see connections and patterns you wouldn’t otherwise. In some ways it actually empowers your brain to think “outside of the box”. That’s something we can all use as jobs get more competitive and creative solutions more needed.