I have a temper.

This isn't obvious when people first meet me. On the east coast where I now live, acquaintances sometimes mistake my California speaking style for mellowness. I've heard "you seem so laid back" so often that I have to suppress howls of laughter. If my husband is in the vicinity, he usually snorts.

It's tempting to say my temper has been genetically determined. My mother's long-time excuse for her rages? "I'm sorry! I'm Sicilian!"

But just as I've never let her off the hook for screaming meanness, I don't believe my Italian ancestry explains my moods.

"The Angry Monk," a piece reprinted in the September/October 2010 issue of the Utne Reader,  got me thinking about anger. And it's helped me to understand why my anger, an old, old friend, no longer seems so useful.

The article by Shozan Jack Haubner originally ran as "When the Tornado Touches Down" in Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly. "A lot of pissed-off people wind up at our monastery," Haubner starts off. He's very funny. He lays out his own struggles with anger as a Buddhist monk, and it's soon clear why he's writing under a pseudonym.

I'm sure anyone with even a brushing acquaintance with Buddhism or meditation knows that sitting in silence can be far from emotional peace. Regardless of how quiet one's body is, the mind can be a wreckless thing.

But I like Haubner's witty article for personal reasons, too. It came into my hands at precisely the moment I needed it: on a recent Jetblue flight to California, my eight-year-old son at my side, me facing a very difficult visit with my ailing elderly parents.

I'd been dreading this trip, because various sad details needed to be worked out about my mother's living arrangements; her bipolar mental state was hard to predict. Yet what I'd been dreading most was my own anger unleashed: my frustration with her inability to make choices, my rage at nobody listening to me for years—rage, rage, rage, all of which I'd expressed to some family member or other, at some point, and which had gone nowhere.

I'm not a Buddhist or a Christian; my spiritual leanings are more amorphous, and like so many of my boomer/slacker generation, I look to psychotherapy as an explanatory savior for what's wrong with me. Yet Haubner notes that spiritual work, unlike the therapeutic agenda, isn't necessarily "instructive":

"It's not supposed to boss you around with behavioral or self-help dictates, or to shoehorn you into the slipper of well-adjusted citizenhood.... [I]t's transformative, and this kind of transformation can get messy. The Sanskrit term for this is clusterfuck."

 Yes! Clusterfuck. The old angry me thinks that's a swell motto.

But I realized on the plane how worried I was about getting angry in front of my son. I wanted to shield him from the kind of terrifying rages I'd witnessed as a child. I didn't think I could control a cascading series of events—and, oh, how a lack of control used to make me shake my fists at the gods.

Now, back home on the "unrelaxed" east coast, I know these worries didn't come to pass. I felt plenty of frustration on this trip; I had moments of intense irritation with my son and others. Yet my old familiar anger—the often embarassing but tough buddy who had bulled me through so many hard times—did not materialize in quite the same way. As Haubner writes,

"Some people...seem to be born angry. Not me. I was born a coward. So when the energy gets moving through Zen practice and I suddenly become angry rather than a quivering eunuch, this can feel like an improvement.... A sharp word suddenly tastes good in my mouth. Anger takes on the illusion of upward spiritual mobility in comparison with my habitual cravenness."

Me, I was born talking. My didactic impulse has channeled all sorts of feelings in the past, including anger and guilt. But more than anything, it's been about my need to control what cannot be controlled: a mentally-ill parent.

My talkiness surfaced on this trip, when I was telling my mother to stop focusing on every worry. I delivered a string of advice in a flat, loud voice, because she's deaf and on principle resists anyone telling her what to do.

But my son, who was justifiably worried about his grandmother, finally whispered in my ear, "I don't think the chat is helping." He was right.

Once I might have said I was born pissed-off, given the many angry letters I've sent to corporations about a variety of customer-service infractions—software that doesn't work, canceled airline flights, the usual rostrum of complaints. I remember so well that particular monkey on my back, my dudgeon rising, the need to do something, anything, to shake it off.

Yet this kind of high dudgeon at faceless corporate or political stand-ins doesn't work for me now. Here's where I believe a spiritual analysis like Haubner's offers forgiveness of everybody's weaknesses, including my own.

He calls anger a lateral move. It packs a punch, so to speak, and it often demands immediate action. The energy of anger can feel like something has been released inside, and maybe it has. For women especially, access to one's anger—and to expressing that anger—can certainly be cathartic. (Think of the response to Alanis Morissette's big hit "You Oughta Know.")

There are many reasons in this world to stand up for yourself, to demand change, to not just smile nicely when others are far from nice. But often anger is a cover for thornier feelings—fear, sadness, grief, soul weariness—all the decidedly unsparky emotions I'm grappling with now.

So am I still scuttling sideways, Shozan Jack? Have I moved forward at all?

I'm not sure. Well, yes, I am. Anger, my old friend, has come back in a new guise. These past weeks, I've been struck by a feeling that used to seem so transgressive: Why can't I be the screw-up, the one who isn't in charge? Why do I have to be so good?

That's not how I operate as a responsible adult, of course. But the disorganized spin of this last year, with all its joyrides and sorrows and trails of logistical detritus, is starting to seem like my spiritual work, the thing that can both drag me down and open me to new ways of being.

My soul is messier than it's ever been. I've outgrown "the slipper of well-adjusted citizenhood." That's my particular clusterfuck these days, my Zen practice—but what the hell. It's a good thing.

Just in case you need a little karaoke for the mess someone made when they went away...