"That's why I say, 'If you pack lightly, you live lightly.' If you can figure out your suitcase, you can pretty much figure out your life."

With four days until Chinese New Year and about two weeks to go until I'm on a plane headed for Shanghai, I have to start making a list of things to pack. So far on my list I have "camera; other camera; water colors?" I'll be landing during Shanghai's coldest month, so I should probably go back and add in some essentials like clothes and my passport and whatnot. But for now, I'll write this post and show you a very cute video of Diane von Furstenberg's own advice for packing a suitcase. If I can figure out my own suitcase, then maybe I can figure out my life too. I'll keep you posted.

DVF from Luis Aguirre on Vimeo.

"If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own."

On my  last birthday, my sister gave me one of the best gifts I have ever received. It was a book titled "China in Ten Words" by Yu Hua, and ever since I unwrapped it, my nose has been buried in its pages every night by the light of a single lamp in my room. It's hard to describe how I feel reading it because Yu Hua writes of things that are both unfamiliar and too familiar to me. But if there was one thing I would want you--reader, seer, and thinker--to take away from my blog, I hope that it would even be the tiniest fraction of what Yu Hua thinks of literature.

So as I start my travels, studies, and wanderings to Shanghai and elsewhere, with this blog as my shadow, I hope that you might be able to discover unfamiliar things, recognize the familiar, and maybe set off to find the things about a place or yourself that you never knew existed--here, there, far and near.