ON BECOMING A MINDFUL BUDDHIST DEMIGOD: Not surprisingly, I've received a few emails and comments about yesterday's post -- the one where I admit to being a hot-headed, thuggish jerk.

Guilty.

Maybe I didn't do a good enough job of communicating how charged the situation was -- how the people behind me were waiting, how the plane was a million degrees, how the guy whose stuff was up there was really making an effort to be a jerk, to show me his contempt for my situation, etc.

No matter. Given all the time I spend reading and thinking about Buddhism and mindfulness, I know well enough that I could have reacted better. There was no need to go on tilt, to let the guy get to me.

So what was the right course? Probably to slow everything down in my head. To make a real effort to connect with the guy, or with somebody else, such that they could empathize with my plight, so that they could help me out with my bag, make some space.

Thing is, there was no overhead bin space evident even a bit farther back. So I would have had to either try and go forward to gate-check my bag -- which was a virtual impossibility, given how many people were behind me trying to get to their seat -- or go to the back of the plane to file my bag somewhere in the bowels of the plane, then try to make my way upstream to my seat. This would, of course, doom me when it came time to deplane, but such is life as a mindful Buddhist demigod, I guess.

Nah. Sometimes the monk must turn his plow into a weapon. I didn't harm anyone. And perhaps in my moment of brute force I spared a whole lot of people a whole lot of jostling.

I'm sure there's some other answer, some other graceful path, but who has the time to figure it out, you know?