The New York Times published an article about how eldest children tend to be ever-so-slightly more “intelligent” than their younger sibs. (Found on Newsvine.)

(I put “intelligent” in quotes because these findings are based on IQ tests, which many people consider an arbitrary measure that is unable to truly separate out important variables like culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, et cetera. What are we actually measuring here? It’s just a composite number, a reification, not rooted in any sort of physiologic process. It does not directly reflect anything about the brain whatsoever, and is basically suspect as a good measure of innate mental ability.)

Interestingly, though, this dynamic seems to kind of hold true in my family.

Now don’t get me wrong. My sibs are by no means drooling morons. Both of them are quite educated and professionals. But looking back, I kind of wonder what sort of frustration they dealt with growing up and always being compared to me. It certainly didn’t help that my brother had a lot of the same teachers I had in elementary school and high school. And even my sister found herself the student of my high school biology teacher.

Ultimately, it comes down to test-taking skills. Game theory. I thrive on multiple choice. I’ve always done well on standardized tests, something that, unfortunately, my sibs have sometimes struggled with.

But we all know that standardized tests aren’t necessary meaningful.

Still, what I found interesting about the article are the theories of why there should be a statistically significant difference.

I like the idea of being the bridge. The conduit. I even wrote my personal statement that got me into med school about this idea.

Being born the eldest, you automatically end up in two worlds. Especially if you grew up an only child for a good long while. My brother wasn’t born until I was four, for example. So I spent my formative years surrounded entirely by adults. This, no doubt, had a strong influence on my vocabulary, and even in my affinity to language in general. Of the three of us, I was the only one to actually learn Tagalog as a sort-of a first language. (Although, by now, my accent is atrocious, and my vocabulary is essentially at fourth-grade level or thereabouts.)

But I suppose a lot of it also had to do with the specific dynamics of my family. When I was learning how to speak, my dad happened to be studying for the board exam in Medicine (the ECFMG, which they administer to foreign medical graduates) I even remember being fascinated by the glossy pages in the Physician’s Desk Reference. (I’m surprised I didn’t become a pharmacist.) And then he ended up in a residency out in the Midwest, and for a little while, it was just me and my mom.

In retrospect, I kind of wonder if that’s why I feel like I never got to completely live out my childhood. Fear, doubt, uncertainty. I think kids just instinctively believe that their parents know how things are going to turn out (even when in reality, they don’t) and that their parents will always be there to protect them from the stark uncertainties of life in general. I think I learned at an early age that there was only so much my parents could do for me, and a lot of things, I would just have to face on my own.

Kind of a weird thing for, say, a second grader to have to wonder about, you know?

But: the whole bridge/conduit thing. When my brother, and then my sister were born, I almost naturally became the fulcrum on which the family balanced. Being a kid, but being more used to always being around adults.

I’ve always been about living in the interstices, I think.

The gap between generations. The gap between cultures (Philippine-born versus American-born). And so it went, the gap between the popular kids and the nerds and geeks. The gap between the hard science/techie guys and the humanities/social science folk/fuzzy guys. (It’s kind of funny that despite being rejected from there, the slang from Stanford has somehow managed to stick with me.) The gap between the mainstream Filipino Americans who were only into hip-hop and modded Japanese imports (so-called rice rockets) and DJ’ing and macking on the fly ladies, and the Filipino Americans on the periphery. The people who didn’t feel the need to always hang out with Filipinos. The folk who were more into activism and less into socializing. The artsy people. The people who had no desire whatsoever to go into medicine or engineering.

Maybe part of it is my passive nature. If you don’t make any effort, you get shunted to the periphery, the interstices. And you get comfortable with whereever you end up.

But it has always stuck with me. What I like is being the translator. The guy who can see two apparently completely disparate things and make a connection. The guy who can see the big picture, the forest instead of the trees. The generalities rather than the specifics. And then you translate. You try to convey the idea from one end to the other, something that people who are more tied to the center would naturally have a harder time doing.

It’s all about living in the periphery of both (or more) worlds.

Ultimately, besides helping people in general, and taking care of the sick, and trying to provide services especially to the poor and the underserved, what I see my role as is the translator. The guy who can put the scientific and medical gobbledygook into layman’s terms that will easily penetrate a patient’s consciousness. In some ways, it’s all about metaphoric imagery. Not everyone knows that the kidneys act as filters, but most people know what filters do, as a trite example.

But anyway. Maybe I’m just playing this up too much.

I just like putting together things that are disparate.

That’s probably why I like mash-ups. I remember in 8th grade, I predicted that we’d come to a point where alternative and hip-hop would somehow merge. And now we’ve got The Roots sampling Radiohead. And Kanye West sampling all sorts of random-ass shit. (I think I even wrote down this prediction somewhere. As if I’ll ever find it.) But whatever.

Some people call it apophenia. I like to think of it (in my own mind, at least) as an Art.