Jeremy Johnson
English 10:30
1-25-17

Journal 3

     Actively reading the last 20 pages in the book, The House on Mango Street, I am drawn to a very short but direct chapter.  I can relate to the feeling in this chapter as I was younger going to out of town games while playing basketball.  The chapter, Those Who Don't, really symbolizes what I felt riding the bus with my basketball team into different cities or states.  As in this chapter Cisneros discuses in a nutshell that everyone is comfortable in their own backyard.  Going into another backyard however, gives you the same feeling that you may see in an outsiders body language coming into your backyard.  Full of labels and paradigms without ever knowing the people that you know in your own backyard.  Its normal to shrug off these labels from others when its your own backyard, yet not so easy to feel easy in someone else's backyard (Cisneros 28).

     Growing up my role model was not a person per say, but a basketball team I was on for many years.  Playing sports as an adolescent gives one discipline or a hot head.  For me I grew up playing with my basketball team and we had many rules and many values that today I carry throughout life.  Being on the team was demanding as life is.  Some of the team were hot heads and tried to take shortcuts on every angle possible.  I began to do the same as it made sense to get things done faster and more simple than expected.  Quickly learning that come game day the shortcuts, as in life, don't get you very far on succeeding the goal at hand.  Shortcuts got me into a lot of difficult spots in games and I started to become frustrated.  As in life, shortcuts were becoming a way of actually making things more difficult than just doing the task at hand right the first time.  Needless to say I did not take shortcuts very long, although very influenced by the teams efforts in making everyday life more simple, I just didn't like the upsets that followed shortcuts.  Now being older I understand that the way things are designed to be followed through are set in place for a various number of reasoning.  It only makes sense to do exactly what is illustrated right the first time to save the upsets from occurring.