For ten years off and on I've sat face-to-face with incarcerated women in various U.S. state and federal facilities, allowed private meetings with nothing but my tape recorder. I write more about this in Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison.

Excerpted from my memoir Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison:

Mother grounded me for some violation I can't remember. She insisted Jonathan, my older brother, and I call her the formal Mother. We're both adopted. I wanted to call her...

One of my favorite singers, Etta James, is terminally ill battling leukemia. She's a wonder! I've seen her perform several times, once when she sang her whole concert propped in a chair center stage. This was the concert I sat in the front row and her drummer flirted with me...

It's Mother's Day, and I'm reminded where I learned to love whimsy and adventure -- my mother. You can read here about the influence of her curiosity, and how it saved me. She also taught me about the vitality of joy in the moment. It started with dance.

It's not that I even like snakes. In fact, I won't post a photo of one here because they creep me out. But for whatever reason, I'm curious about the practice of snake handling. (Like any good Jewish girl, right?)

Okay I'll admit that's getting really mutty*, snake handling and...

Sometimes, when the world seems crazy out there, we all get that inside voice going. You know what I mean; it's like the talk bubble in a cartoon.

Let's say you're out alone one summer night and you pop into a sushi bar. You're single and hot with your creamy,...

What are the odds of this?

These days, my prison mother's name, Martha, pops up everywhere I turn.

All about a name, the name of my birth mother whom I only knew in the Federal Women's Prison in Alderson, West Virginia, where I was born heroin-addicted, and where she served...

More than words sometimes, I'm inspired by visuals. And not just art.

Flow charts, graphs and pie charts are some of the entertainment that got me through my degree in economics. Besides the fact that econ was one of the (legal) rebellions against my English professor poet and literary critic...

I'm in the midst of writing a memoir. How I arrived at this writing project took much persuasion along a winding road from a short story of mine, now turned into a bio.

I usually choose fiction over real life. The process, however, has me tracking how I made it...

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

-- Anne Sexton

June is the month of Father's Day, but I'm still on the mother-theme of last month.

One advantage to having a lot of mothers in early life (like me) is...

Aren't we tired of 140 characters and tweeting pearls of wisdom (or dregs of meaningless chatter?)

Last year, around this time, I wrote about Passover: Why not a Haggadah in 140 Characters? (You can read it here.)

Positive feedback came in from all faiths: Jews (secular to Orthodox,...

Is anyone in their right mind able to really work with all the action behind track changes in a document?

What was the Microsoft programmer thinking when building this feature?

I know it's useful but I'm thinking: How can it be good if the whole experience of working with...

Who Says Cheese Causes Nightmares?

When the British Cheese Board issued their 2005 study about the effect of cheese on sleep, who knew we'd snooze better after a snack on a slice of Cheddar or Stilton?

The study explored how...

A monk skateboards inside an historic temple and causes controversy in China.

In Sichuan province near the top of Mount Emei, the highest of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China, stands the Dafu Temple. Here, a monk on a skateboard has stirred controversy about whether his skateboarding is appropriate...

While the Have-Nots Look for Work and Housing...

Don't you love off-the-charts contrast? I do. While we have tent cities going up around the U.S., the extravagant offerings of Neiman Marcus' 2009 Christmas Book were unveiled last week. It's their 83rd annual catalog and don't worry, you can get...

Do "AHA" moments really come out of nowhere?

Like other wild minds out there, my creativity is off the charts, as people tell me. I like to draw on quirky instincts to come up with unexpected ideas (that probably comes from my "out of the box" start in...

What are you doing today to transform?

Before I recognized that being multiracial unites me with others, rather than separates, I used to consider myself an outcast. And I've grown beyond thinking of my birth in prison as a stigma. In fact, I'm lucky to have a wider world...

NOODLES OR SUV's?

In 2005, archaeologists unearthed the earliest empirical evidence of noodles ever found, a 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles in China. Scientists reported this as the earliest example of our staple dish ever found.

This bowl of preserved, thin and long yellow noodles was discovered inside an...

Do you know the meaning of your name?

I believe that names tell a story of who we are. I've had two given first names (besides the nicknames I've had along the way.) At birth I was named Madlyn, then re-named Deborah after adoption.

My name is a big...

I always take action with my Attitude Factor, and you can boost yours, too. We each do this in our own way, but no matter what, life is only as good as we believe it to be. As the saying goes: If you hope for rain, don't complain about the...