The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 10/23/09 Section: Spotlight

Media Credit: Brown, Aaron

Seniors Peter Truax (Geography, Stillwater, Minn.), Chelsea Thibodeau (Biology, Duluth, Minn.), Joe Ptacek (Neuroscience, Linguistics, White Fish Bay, Wisc.), live with Ian Noble (Music, Memphis, Tenn.) a "super-junior," but the senior member of their household.

TMW: I hear you have a name for this house.

Joe Ptacek: The name of our internet network is the Muffin Shop. Sometimes. Other times it's Linksys.
Chelsea Thibodeau: I think the Muffin Shop is stupid, and I never agreed to this.
Ian Noble: I named it.
JP: I always assumed it was called the Muffin Shop because the Muffin Shop is a closed network and the line from Mean Girls is "The Muffin Shop is closed!"
CT: Oh, that's clever, I never knew that.
Peter Truax: You thought we were going to make a lot of muffins.
JP: That was post hoc. Make sure that the world knows I used the word post hoc.

TMW: How did you decide to live together?

JP: I was supposed to live with Ian years ago.
PT: So Joe and I lived together our sophomore year. And Joe and Ian lived together his [Joe's] junior year, his [Ian's] second sophomore year.
CT: And then I was abroad and I didn't know where I was going to live, I was just ignoring it.
PT: So Ian and Joe and I are sitting in Café Mac last spring while Chelsea's in Denmark and we decide, "Ok, so, who should we live with?" blah blah blah and we ran through a bunch of people…
JP: We were thinking "who should we live with?" One of the first things that we proposed was Chelsea, right?
CT: The first things? Or people?
IN: Chelsea was the first girl.
PT: We proposed living a Volkswagon Bug. We also thought about living with a room full of xenon gas. We eventually settled on Chelsea. In part because the xenon would suffocate us if we went to hang out with it.
JP: Volkswagon would be fun, but they're pretty stationary. They don't take stairs well.
PT: We'd have to drive it out through the wall. We live on the second floor so it'd probably only work once.
JP: And they're dangerous cars, our insurance would go through the roof.

TMW: So let's hear about the nickname Cha Cha.

JP: Why is she called Cha Cha? The world wants to know.
CT: I don't think anyone wants to know.
PT: The nature progression of shortening names. We have Joseph-Joe, Ianusifus-Ian, Chelsea shortens to Cha Cha.
IN: That's not even remotely true.
CT: Liz and I shortened it to Cha Cha. We were discussing unnecessary abbreviations and Chels was not a short enough nickname for me.
JP: Why? It's one syllable.
CT: It was a conversation, we were making some jokes. We were laughing at people who abbreviate too many things. Some abbrevs… It's a little redonk, if you will. So I was like, what is short for Chels? And they said Cha. And then someone said Cha Cha. And then Peter overheard or Peter said it-
PT: Yeah! CHA CHA!
CT: And then it became that for the summer.
PT: The summer? Are you kidding? It's still going.
JP: It had a peak. Cha Cha McThibs.

TMW: I know that some of you guys are/were Trads.

CT: And by some of you guys, meaning all of the males.
JP: Once a Trad always a Trad.
PT: Chelsea is a government contractor with the Trads. She's an affiliate.
JP: She's not a government, she's not a state. She's an NGO.
PT: Yes, a Non-Trad Government Organization.
JP: I'm in charge of the Trads.
PT: I'm in charge of the social functions. And Ian is the immediate Trad Emirati.
JP: Ian was very recently a Trad and is still a Trad.
PT: The Trads never have and never will be state sponsors of terrorism.
IN: The Tradiban.
PT: That is not humorous.
JP: One thing the Trads do is, we insert Trads into various words. It's pretty versatile.
PT: Tradslate. Tradegy.
IN: Tradgical mystery tour.
JP: Which is the name of our album.
CT: Traduation.
IN: I'm a traduate.
JP: It fits with a lot of words.
CT: What am I in Trads language?
PT: Whore.
IN: You're a trally.

TMW: Do you guys do anything together as a house?

PT: Well last night we watched porn together.
JP: That's not true.
PT: We investigated pornographic images.
JP: We watched. … what was it?
IN: Big sausage pizza.
JP: If you go to bigsausagepizza.com, it's just a dude with a pizza box. He's like "I got a pizza, dude!" and then you open the box and it's just a dick. In a pizza.
PT: In all of these pictures the guy was just like, "What? My dick's on a pizza? What?!"
JP: So we didn't actually watch porn together. We looked at porn.
CT: We do other things together. We ate dinner together the other night. Usually it's when. Peter or I will make dinner, and we'll all eat it.
JP: Cha Cha's Chilli.
PT: Cha Cha's famous Chach-tastic Chili Choo Choo.
IN: Cha Cha's Chili Choo Choo!!
PT: A business idea!
IN: A cooking show for children!
PT: It'll market great in the Southwest!
JP: We've spooned, we've made dinner together, we go to bars together, me and Ian sing together, me and Peter sing together.
PT: We've all sung together.
JP: We're musical.
CT: Sometimes we play my little musical keyboard.
IN: We jam out.
CT: Make some beats.



CT: Whenever we go out together as a house-this started when Ian was leaving to go work at this camp in Wisconsin and we went to the Green Mill and had some drinks and we're talking about some things, like we often do, and Joe started illustrating the things we were talking about. One that included some naked females getting it on, and a naked male conga line. So now whenever we go out, Joe draws penis drawings on napkins.
IN: When we go out we often have in-depth philosophical discussions, either being science arguments between Peter and Joe where Chelsea and I just get really bored, because they're talking about physics and metaphysics.

TMW: What is your favorite thing about living here with each other?

PT: This is an active way of fulfilling the college's values of internationalism, multiculturalism, civic engagement, and civic engagement.
IN: With the exception of Peter, I feel like my housemates are family to me. Peter as well, when he's not being a dick. They're all from relatively close, and I'm from pretty far away and I don't get home very often. If I go home once a year I'm pretty lucky. It just means a lot for me to live with these guys and actually feel like I have something worthwhile to come home to.
JP: I'm always happy to come home. I'm always happy to see anybody home, when I come home. And I think that's a good sign. I come up the stairs and it doesn't matter if it's Chelsea, Ian or Peter sitting at the table. I'm happy.
IN: Sitting at the door waiting.
JP: With my slippers.
PT: Darling you're home!
IN: With your slippers and a leash so you can take us on a walk.
CT: I've thought about this numerous times. I would say that I laugh approximately-actually I can't even approximate how many times I laugh a day-but I would say that more than half of those times are in this house. And I laugh every day, and even if I only laugh once in a day, it happened here. Sometimes it's not laughing at something funny so much as laughing at something stupid beyond all possible reason.
PT: But the thing is we all have different dynamics with one another. I'm going to usurp your positionality in this discourse.
JP: What does that even mean? I'm a scientist!
CT: Three out of four of us are technically scientists.
IN: Then what am I?
CT: A musician!
JP: Musical scientist.
PT: One of the reasons that I enjoy living here so much, more than living with anyone else is because we all have different dynamics with each other. Ian and I sleep in two halves of one big room essentially. And so we have, like I'll start out the day with Joe, and we'll have our interactions, we'll go for a job.
CT: Joe's not even up until noon.
PT: Yeah, Joe sleeps late. Chelsea and I at least resent him for that. The reason I like living here so much is because I do get enjoyment out of all these people, even in the frictional moments that are caused when Chelsea's otherwise staid personality runs into the cliffs of my ridiculousness. But basically, in many ways I serve to bring these three out of reality into a world of utter madness and strangeness. That's my view, and whenever these people refute that and think of me as normal in some way, I inevitably end up disproving them.
CT: I don't think any of us would try to assert that you're normal.
IN: Yeah, seriously Peter.
JP: But none of us are normal.
IN: I am. Fuck you guys.
PT: Fuck you!

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