Life and Basil Limeade

August 8, 2024
By Aathreya Kadambi

Check this out, if you have a Spotify account and are logged into this browser, you can listen to this song while you read:

So far, the summer has been pretty good! I finally got a chance to start a garden which now includes succulents, basil (which finally developed roots recently!), and money plants, upgraded the blog, and learned a lot about language models and partial differential equations. I also gained a lot of weight back (I had unintentionally lost around 10 pounds or so in the last year) and a tiny bit of muscle too by doing lots of pushups. I’ve had some moments where I felt kind of down, though. In particular, I feel like I messed up a lot of things, like not paying enough attention in quantum mechanics and not knowing enough to make “cool” progress in research.

I think I really first started to enjoy math when I studied number theory, because I kind of had the freedom to just play around with numbers and figure out whatever I wanted to about them. After I learned the proof of Fermat’s theorem and later about Legendre’s symbols, I really got to play around with what I new and try my ideas on unsolved problems. I made up lots of ideas in lots of notebooks, and even got to rederive a lot of the basic results that exist on certain conjectures. Nothing too fancy, but very enjoyable.

These days, I feel like every problem I can try is too rushed. I don’t have enough years to learn all of mathematics, and all the classes seem like they could be studied individually for a century (in fact in a lot of cases, they have been). I never get enough time to dwell on the questions I care about most, and I often struggle with balancing when to spend a ton of time having fun trying to discover something myself, versus reading about the solutions the millions of brilliant mathematicians before me have already came up with. How am I supposed to become cool like them when I feel like there isn’t enough time to learn everything, and at the same time, I can’t make a serious attempt at any cool problem if I haven’t taken the time to learn everything?

I’m probably overexaggerating the problem, since I think what I’ve seen myself and watched other people do is that as you just go ahead and try a problem even with a major lack of understanding, you start to develop an understanding of things quicker. Somehow, I feel like the fastest way to learn something is to just forget about learning the details the first hand, and then making enough mistakes that you figure out the details over time.

But I think what I’ve noticed is that part of the problem is actually tiredness! Whenever I’m in a good mood and feeling energized, I feel like I’d more likely be doing something that I like than being glum in a corner thinking about my shortcomings hahaha. And what I’ve discovered is that a miraculous drink I’ve been making recently called “basil limeade” has really been helping me feel more energized (I’m guessing I’m probably dehydrated, but hey, this recipe makes the water taste wayyyy better). I also saw an instagram post about a random person who likes to do certain things with the intent of “raising morale”, which I think is interesting and useful since sometimes I neglect taking a step back and seeing if I need to raise my own morale. So here’s the strat:

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Ingredients

• Basil leaves and stem that smell awesome
• One third of a lime

How to make it

To make it, simply add the lime into a glass of water, and then add basil too! :-)

So simple, I probably didn’t need to make an entire section for it. But I decided to anyway because in the future, I might try to start making recipe posts! 😉

I’ve found that exposing the lime as much as much as possible is best for the flavor. It’s best to cut the lime into small slices or half slices, and then put them into your water. The basil flavor is honestly hard to tell, so far whenever I’ve made it it’s been overpowered by the lime. But you can smell the fragrance a bit, and biting the leaves and stem, of course, really let’s you taste the basil a little.

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Honestly, this drink is super simple and really energizing! I think some people might prefer adding a bit of sugar, but I think it tastes just fine plain, since I really like limes. Generally, I use cold water, but I might try hot water some time, so that it’s pretty much an “herbal tea”. I think the best part about it is that you can reuse the same lime/basil for many glasses of water, which motivates me to drink a lot more water each day whereas for a while I think I might have been totally dehydrating myself just by neglecting to drink water. 💀

Welp, that’s pretty much it. I also recently discovered some good songs:

Two of these were from a game: Life is Strange. I haven’t finished it, but it’s a really good game by Square Enix. I really like the setting and idea behind the game, and the story is good. The music is also awesome and has a really tranquil and nostalgic feel to it. Some songs, though, like In My Mind by Amanda Palmer, were also kind of funny and interesting. Amanda Palmer also has a blog, so I decided to check out some of her really early posts (some of the first ones on her blog). I really liked them, because they’re just a few words that look to be in the form of a poem, and are really short and simple to read. Maybe I’ll try that some time. Here are some examples:

• https://amandapalmer.net/posts/20030428/
• https://amandapalmer.net/posts/20030530/
• https://amandapalmer.net/posts/20030929/

Also check out the way her blog is structured too: https://blog.amandapalmer.net/category/dresden-dolls/, I really like how the posts are not aligned. It has a sort of “messy” feel, but in a way that makes it feel more natural and homey. I also like the post previews, I miiight start doing that instead of short summaries.

White Winter Hymnal was shown to me by Spotify’s AI, and it’s honestly really good and slightly scary. The aritsts definitely accomplished their goal of writing a song that people humm while doing the dishes and things like that. After looking into the songs lyrics, I read a few Grimm fairy tales which were a bit scary as well and had pretty dark undertones for being so called “children’s fairy tales”. I would definitely recommend reading some.

That’s about it for now! Catch ya later! (Which is potentially going to be real soon, since I’m about to start writing another post on ladder operators ;).