Nicknames... I'll answer to anything

I've grown up in a family where no one was called by their real name (or at least... hardly ever). Since I was born, I've had a nickname assigned to me and have accumulated much more through the years from family and friends alike. There is almost no instance where two people call me by the same name. It's odd... and I will share them all with you now:

Red Fraggle: Pretty self explanatory. I enjoyed the crazy adventures of Gobo Fraggle and his gang on the coveted 80s TV series Fraggle Rock as a kid (and probably would now if it were still on). Calling me "Red" was only natural since that was one of the characters' names as well as my hair color. In recent years, it only seems to be my Dad calling me this, but it is still present.

Pook: derived from "Pookie". When I was younger I had a small bear known as Pookie Bear... apparently the name stuck to me as well, for some god-forsaken reason, and my sister used to call me that when we were kids, especially when she was mad at me. My parents' favorite quote from Steff was. "Pookie, you piss me off" when she was 5 or 6 years old. Way to watch the "profanities" around the youngsters mom and pop! Now my sister calls me "Pook"... She is 24, and I'm 22...

Yeba: Now this is an interesting story... or at least to me it is. When I was in 10th grade, I had Spanish class with 2 of my closest friends. We all had to choose our Spanish names from a list. We were to be referred to as those names while in that class. I picked "Eva" because of my fascination with Eva Peron (lead character in "Evita"... historical figure in Argentina). In Spanish, the "V" is pronounced like a "B", so really my name was pronounced "Eba" (A-ba). My friend Candi decided that she would add a "Y" for the hell of it and call me "Yeba" (Yay-ba). It began to catch on in class, and by week 2 my teacher was calling me "Yeba". Marvelous! I am still called that by Candi to this day... 5 years after leaving high school.

G: The letter standing for "Geek". My friend Rachel and I were not dorks. We weren't the most popular kids in school, but we were pretty high up there, as was all of our friends. However, we decided to join the plays/musicals at school. Like in most schools, ours had a connotation that went along with the actors... Drama Geeks. We were afraid we would be thought of as geeks, but decided to join despite our fears. Luckily the "geek" term was not associated to us, but we became closer and saw each other's inner geek, therefore we decided to call each other "G" for short, in reference to our true selves. Many sub-forms of this name have arose: G-dawg, G1 (me) and G2 (her), G-dizzle, etc... You get the picture. I am still only known as G in Rachel's eyes. In fact, she called me the other day and left me a message: "Hi Lisa, it's me... whoa, that was weird. I don't think I've said your real name in a while. I won't do it again... G, what's up..."

Chill: I am called this by my BFF Julie. I call her this as well. It all started around Halloween time Junior year of college when she came up to visit me at U of M. We went to a random house party with Rachel and Lindsay (the one who always comments on here). While drunk, Rachel begins describing some guy she knows and likes, saying: "Oh you have to meet him, he's so chill." Me and Julie stopped, turned toward one another, and burst out laughing. It sounded like she was some fraternity guy using that lingo. So after the mocking of Rachel ended (which took a while) we landed on a decision: we would now be known to each other as "Chill". Sort of weird I know, but it works for us, right Chill?

Bear: My ex boyfriend's name for me. It has a reference to the Nickelodeon show, "Little Bear", but I still don't know how we landed on this as a nickname for me. He has plenty for me... I'll just list a few and spare you the explanation (but after you read a few, you may want one): Goat, Nick Papageorgio, Crabgrass, Snorlocks (from PokeMon), etc...

Little Kitty: My close friend Charisse calls me this. Of course it is because I have a distinct love of cats, especially her cats (see post called "Javier"). She uses this high pitch squeak to say: "Hello Kitty" sometimes when she calls. We also use this voice when speaking to the cats...

LD: Known as this around the agency. My initials... duh!


The funny thing is... I have nicknames for everyone else. In high school especially, we gave everyone nicknames, whether they knew it or not. We named the whole Pom team in fact, so that we could talk about them and no one but our small group would know who were were talking about (Examples: Sheriff (my sister), Deputy (her best friend), kindergarten Pom, Red-faced pom, Pillsbury-dough pom (hahahaha), etc) Some of them weren't the most creative, but they sure did entertain us.