Chelish...explained

WTF is a Chelish?

It all started back in High School (how far back is that you ask?  far enough).  A friend of mine made the mistake of calling me "Chels"*.  I lashed out.  Like, I was irrationally angry.  Red in the face, increased heart rate, yelling, kicking, punching (well maybe not so much kicking & punching...but you get the idea) angry.  My friends were all 'woah, dude...calm down'.  But it was enough that they gave me a new nickname.  chelchel. Somehow, I decided that this was better than Chels and it stuck.  It became my AIM name, my new email address...everything was chelchel.  To this day, I use chelchel as my username for most accounts.

A few years later (though, still in high school), chelchel became just Chel.  Though in retrospect, I don't think the two nicknames actually had anything to do with one another.  A friend just naturally shortened Chelsea to Chel (because everyone has to have a 1-syllable nickname...it's just necessary), instead of the more common Chels.  I was OK with that though.  I liked it.  

Fast forward to my freshman year of college.  When my new roomies and I introduced ourselves, we were required to give a suitable 1-syllable nickname (because it's a thing...I already explained this).  I, of course, said they should use Chel and avoid Chels if they valued their lives. :-)

As we got to know each other and grow closer, my roommate KJ (or kaje for short), started noticing that I had some quirks that were unique to me.  Be it absent-mindedness, habits, vocabulary, whatever - she deemed these behaviors "Chelish".  As in, "that's so Chelish" (ah-ha!) or "that's such a Chelish thing to do/say". It wasn't necessarily negative or positive...it just was (or so I choose to believe).  For example, I wore a watch in college.  I wore it on my right hand, even though I'm right-handed.  ...that's so chelish!  It became so commonplace that they started calling me Chelish too.  I even went so far as to get a t-shirt printed that said Chelish across the chest (I'll have to dig it out and post a picture some day).  

Anyway, "that's so chelish" kind of died out after freshman year, when we all moved to new dorms and pursued our own individual things.  But when trying to come up with a fun name for a blog about me, Chel, it became obvious that Chelish needed to be resurrected.  So there you go ("So today here, we have apples and oranges. We all different now but in the end we're all fruit").

*I have no idea why I reacted the way I did to being called Chels.  I just get really bad vibes, almost to the point of a panic attack when I'm called that, even now just writing about it, my chest is getting tight...ugh.  I attribute it to the mother of an old friend from elementary school who always called me Chels.  I didn't get along with her very well and thinking about her now grates on my nerves.  I don't know why.  She never did anything to me.  We just didn't mesh, and that has forever ruined Chels for me, I guess.