Charles and David Puelz, identical twins from Dallas, are doubly Other at Wesleyan. Fascinated, The Argus sat down with them to talk about their psychic bond, where people keep guns on campus, and which twin hogged the placenta.

The Argus: So, I’ll start with the obvious question. Which one of you is the evil twin?

Charles Puelz: I guess that depends on how you define evil.

 

A: Well, what do most people say?

CP: I think most people would say David.

 

A: So as the good twin, why do you think he’s considered the evil one?

CP: Probably because he’s younger.

David Puelz: I’m definitely the more immature twin.

 

A: Do you think you feel a lot of responsibility to set a good example for your little brother, Charles?

CP: Interesting question. Not really.

DP: He’s always tried to beat some sense into me, but it hasn’t really worked.

CP: It’s weird because he’s the younger one, but he’s always been the bigger one. I think that’s how it works in general, but everyone always thinks he’s older.

 

A: Is there a reason for that?

CP: To be honest, I think it’s because he got more of the placenta.

DP: It’s interesting, because when we were born, I was five and a half pounds, Charles was four and a half, and we sort of carried that same ratio until maybe like age 16, then we finally started equaling out. But I was always like 15 or 20 pounds heavier than him, so even though he was older I could match up with him pretty well physically.

 

A: What’s the standing record in terms of fights?

CP: Well, being identical twins, we usually end up in a draw. Someone always starts crying.

 

A: So, on the flip side, which of you is better looking?

DP: You tell us.

 

A: Well, who’s more romantically successful?

CP: I’m less romantic and less successful. I’m definitely the less successful twin.

DP: Well it’s one of those things. I’ve definitely had more girlfriends than Charles…

CP: Jesus Christ, what are you talking about?

DP: It’s true.

CP: What, did you count?

DP: I mean, starting from High School…

CP: What do you mean? That’s just not true.

DP: I’m not going to start listing off people right now, but it’s true.

 

A: Do you try to get people to rank you a lot?

CP: I’ve heard of people rating us. Like Qianqian’s Senior Fauver had a poll of who’s the hotter twin.

DP: Actually the main question we usually get is whether we shower together.

 

A: Do you shower together?

DP: No.

CP: The weird thing is we’re carbon copies, so these things are usually a draw.

 

A: Do your parents ever get you mixed up?

DP: Yeah, if we’re upstairs in our house and our mom yells up to us, she can’t really tell us apart. But when she sees us she can.

CP: There are just some people who just can’t tell twins apart, it’s not in their DNA. There are definitely some professors who get us mixed up.

A: Can you ever use that to your advantage?

DP: Well I’ll have conversations with people on campus who think I’m Charles. People will just walk up to me and be really nice, and I’ll have no idea who they are. But I don’t want to say “I don’t know you,” so I just carry on the conversation with them, and then later I have to update Charles with all the details.

CP: Yeah, maybe we can use this WesCeleb set up to apologize to everyone we’ve ignored when they tried to talk to us, thinking we were the other twin.

DP: Yeah, Charles is a TA for a math class, I’m a TA for another math class and people in those different sections get confused, and then they see us together and it blows their minds.

 

A: Has either of you ever scheduled two dates at once and called in the other for support?

DP: No, but we joke about that a lot. It would be nice to share a girlfriend because you would have a lot more stamina.

CP: That’s disgusting.

 

A: Did you guys plan to go to college together, or was that sort of a coincidence?

DP: We definitely entered into the college application process separately. We talked about this and said we would make our decisions independently. We were actually recruited to play football at Colorado College, but we’re glad we didn’t go there now because in our sophomore year they dropped the program. So we think we got the best deal.

 

A: Do you get a special rate on tuition?

CP: Like a package deal? Based on how much our dad complains, I don’t think so.

 

A: Is it going to be weird separating, since one of you is going to grad school and one is going to the real world?

DP: I don’t think so. This last summer Charles was doing research at MIT and I was in Los Angeles, and it’s kind of nice developing your own identity outside of being a twin. But yeah, it’s always nice having him around to bounce ideas off of.

 

A: Is there like a psychic connection? Do you both feel it when one of you is in pain?

CP: Well there was one point in time when David was in L.A., and he was almost in the middle of a gang shooting, and I definitely felt something.

 

A: So can we apply that for faster-than-light communication?

DP: Oh we do that all the time. It’s just one of the many advantages of being an identical twin.

CP: They say it doesn’t exist, but it does.

 

A: So coming from Texas, do you run into a lot of misconceptions about your homeland?

DP: Well most people don’t understand that Texas is an independent country. We were hoping to get the Freeman Scholarship.

CP: Just coming up here, I knew nothing about the Northeast, and people think they know about Texas, but they don’t. Hm, but what was the main misconception?

DP: I think people in Texas are a lot more open-minded than people up here give them credit for, especially in the big metropolitan areas. Dallas County went for Obama in 2008. There’s a lot of open-minded people down there and a lot of nice people too.

CP: Yeah, I think the biggest misconception is that everyone is super-conservative and narrow-minded. But just like at Wesleyan, the majority, or at least the plurality is moderate and mostly everyone’s reasonable. It’s just that the people who are crazy down south are conservative instead of extremely liberal.

 

A: Presumably you grew up on a ranch herding cattle and whatnot. Was it a big transition coming somewhere with roads and electricity?

DP: Yeah, we thought we could bring our horses up, but that didn’t work out.

CP: We brought our guns up initially. We both have Beretta shotguns that we take dove hunting back in Texas, and we thought it would be fun to bring them up and take some of our friends out shooting, and we did for the first few years. But now I don’t think they allow them on campus.

DP: Yeah you can’t even keep them at P-Safe.

 

A: So you actually could before?

DP: Yeah, there was a gun safe.

CP: David and I weren’t the only ones.

DP: Yeah, we kept our .28 shotguns on campus, took people out a few times. We also hunt back in Texas.

CP: People hunt up here, but it’s mostly big game. But not much bird hunting. There’s good bird hunting back in Texas, especially West Texas.

DP: Yeah, we’ll go out for fall and shoot a couple hundred doves.

A: What do you do with a couple hundred doves?

DP: You eat ‘em. You eat ‘em all. We’ve actually brought some up for our grill-outs up here and people love them. We prepare them in a very special way.

CP: Yeah, so this is how you do it: you filet the dove, you take the two lobes, put a jalapeño in between them, wrap them in bacon, marinate them in Worcester sauce and you grill them. They’re amazing. I mean anything with jalapeños and bacon is good.

 

A: How many doves make a meal?

DP: For one person, probably like ten.

CP: They’re really tiny birds.

DP: They’re not really a meal. They’re more of a hors d’oeuvre.

CP: Our mom always makes fun of us for shooting the bird of peace. But they’re not the white doves you see in movies. And they’re tasty.