Find somebody to love. No, not that guy. No, not that fool either. Look, it can’t be just anybody. This person needs to be someone who makes you want to puke and smile at the same time. They need to be able to show you something you’ve never seen before, uncover some secret about human beings and how they relate to each other that will make you feel like you’re a part of an exclusive club.

Find one yet?

I’m waiting.

I’m still waiting.

Can you hurry up?

Fantastic! You found one. Let me examine them for a second.

…..

….

……

Okay, perfect. You’re good to go. You could definitely love this person. Now let’s move on to the next step.

In preparation for falling in love, you should watch mainstream romantic comedies, read self-help books about people who love too much and magazine interviews with Jennifer Aniston, listen to love songs on a record player, and ask your friends what it feels like and how they did it. Nod your head slightly when a point they make seems to resonate and bleed into your skull. Have them give you a reassuring pat on the back and tell you that you’re going to be just fine.

Did you get all that? Okay, now I want you to forget everything you just learned. Forget Reese Witherspoon movies and Jennifer Aniston’s words of wisdom. Forget Bethenny Frankel’s book about making vegan cookies and falling in love with a stockbroker. Forget your Mariah Carey power ballads, and forget your friends’ advice because no one falls in love the same way. Everyone is at different points in their lives and accepts different kinds of love. The friend you just talked to about love may’ve had more self-worth than you do and is experiencing a kind of relationship that you aren’t ready for. Or maybe it’s on the contrary. Maybe their relationship kind of sucks and your friend is giving you bad advice because their definition of love is a cold shoulder. Whatever it is, just wipe the slate clean. Forget what pop culture and your friends have taught you, and go into it with an open mind. Pretend you’re an alien who’s been sent to earth to experience love for the very first time. That’s you! You’re an alien! Yay!

When you first start falling in love with someone, you should definitely ignore your friends. Everyone does it in the beginning and it’s actually A-OK. Go have fun living in your own little dreamworld for a bit. Screw the days away, get food delivered, turn off the computer, ignore text messages. Honeymoon stages can make you feel like you’re living in the 1800s. Modern conveniences start to not matter at all. The only thing you need to get through the day is this person’s love and affection. Twitter? What’s that? I’M IN LOVE, BITCH!

Watch the days pass by through looking out your window. Feel like you’re high. Your body and mind are buzzing, and it’s perfectly legal for once! Get lost in this new person. Get lost and don’t find your way back until it’s time. You’ll know when this will be and if you don’t, you have your friends and your job to tell you when to snap back to reality.

Over time, the honeymoon fades away like a postcard with tears on the edges, and you’re going to encounter the issue of compromise. In a relationship, when do you know if you’re compromising too much or too little? Are you being too selfish or too selfless? Look, I’m not the Goldilocks of love. Knowing when you have it juuuuuuuust right depends on the individual relationship, but there are some universe telltale signs that you might be headed in the wrong direction.

If you’re someone who’s stubborn, inflexible and a control freak, loving somebody is going to teach you to put someone else’s needs before yours. Do you want to have your usual coffee at the same place with your newspaper, or do you want somebody to love you? Okay, that might be a tad dramatic but the message is applicable. Your struggle is going to be about letting someone screw up your routine and not resenting them for it. This person should be worth being uncomfortable for. This person is worth letting go of some things that ultimately don’t matter.

If you’re someone who throws themselves into relationships and perhaps gives too much, you need to establish boundaries early on so you don’t become the selfless one. Ideally, this person you love wouldn’t put you in this position but again, the emphasis is on the word ideally. People aren’t perfect. We reinforce vicious cycles without even realizing it sometimes.

Loving someone is a balancing act. There’s you. There’s them. Mix and stir and pray the recipe doesn’t turn out crappy. If the person you’re with is really worth loving, you’re going to realize that they don’t want you to change. They just want you to be best version of yourself. That’s what it’s all about: finding someone who wants to super size you.

Do you have that? Is this the person for you? I think it is.

What you’re also going to realize is that the most special moments of loving someone often occur in the quietest moments. In the movies, it’s always the grandest declarations of love in a train station or an airport but, hello, that’s why I told you to forget that movie crap. The most amazing moments are the ones you wouldn’t even think to film. It can be just the way someone looks at you or wipes away the cum from your stomach or holds your hand when their body tenses up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blah, blah, blah. So sentimental and schmaltzy, but whatever. I dare you not to crumble into a happy puddle when this kind of stuff happens to you.

I don’t know what it’s like to love someone past today, so if you want advice on marriage and kids, ask Meryl Streep because she seems to have it together. This is just what love has been like for me. And maybe for you. And maybe that guy over there. It’s important to remember this always, even when you’re single or just about to enter a new relationship. I can tell you how to love somebody, I can tell you how to love yourself, but in the end it may not even matter at all. Love comes easier to us than we even realize. It’s what we’re built to do. It’s the best job we’ll ever have.

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When I was 25 I decided to quit my job and move back in with my parents. Before I moved, I was living on the coast of San Diego County, working for a newspaper in Del Mar, where I was the only reporter and photographer. I worked less than 35 hours a week and could surf before and after work—sometimes surfing during work hours if the waves were good enough and I had my three stories for the week in.

It was a good gig, but I was writing a novel and California was too distracting and too expensive to live there unemployed. So I left my shortboard with a friend in Encinitas and packed my car for my parents’ farm in western Nebraska. I gave it three months before I would finish the last quarter of the book, revise it, send out queries, get published, and either move back to the beach or anywhere else I wanted to live. I had no idea a year and a half later I would still be living at home.

There wasn’t much else to do but finish the novel, and as I waited months for editors and agents to respond, I realized I had terribly misjudged the speed of the publishing industry. I had misjudged a lot of things.

As it turned out, the newspaper in my hometown was hiring. The paper was larger than the one I had just left, and an editor in California had once advised me that if I “could handle a Midwestern winter or two—most people can’t—I could turn the experience into something useful for my resume.”

Looking back on it today, working for the newspaper in my hometown was one of the best journalism experiences I’ve had in my career. But still, living in the house I had left at 18, been trying to leave since I was 16, when I was supposed to be free, independent, and living out in the world? It was a tough reality to accept.

There is an implied cowardice in moving back in with your parents that is hard to shake. Going back home is an anti-Old World America move. It’s anti-self reliance. Anti-Emerson. Everything we’re taught growing up is that to be a good, strong American it must involve a lack of dependency on others. To ask for help is to be weak. Crawling back to the nest is mocked.

Some days when I was supposed be out covering the new tractors at the Farm and Ranch Museum I would instead sneak in a poker game with my Dad and his friends. They liked to tease me about finally being able to pay rent each time I won a hand. If you asked my parents they would say they loved having me home. If you asked me at the time I would have said something different.

My cousin got married that spring and at the wedding I met a girl that was also home for a number of complicated reasons. We had gone to the same school out in the country, two in a class of seven, but weren’t really that close after we went into town for high school. While I was in college and later in California she was in Oregon and Montana and Hawaii. Neither of us knew that much about the world. Both of us knew we would rather have been out it in than back in Nebraska.

Before we started dating, in the early part of the summer, one night we drove up to my father’s farm by the same school we had attended as kids. She was driving and we when we got to the alfalfa field I asked her to stop. It was around midnight, the moon just imperfect enough to not be full—its light giving the sky a dim glow and making the stars less detailed, less clear than they normally would have been. We got out of the car and walked into the field, the alfalfa fragrant, about to bloom.

In those first few weeks we often talked about the places we would rather be. That night she was talking about Tonga. I was talking about Brooklyn. Now that I write this, knowing it took me six years from that day to finally get there, to even see it, I wonder why I didn’t go then. Right then. That next morning. Back then I had a car I could sell. I had friends there. I could have left, but I didn’t. Maybe I wanted to wait until I knew a little more about the world. Maybe I already had hope for us. Anyway, I stayed through that summer. The job got better. I was saving money and helping my career. We fell in love enough to give the Plains a real shot and found ways to make our lives seem beautiful and unique.

We did a lot of things we imagined not many people our age were doing. We herded bulls on horseback. We watched dozens of blue herons soar, with their slow, prehistoric-seeming grace, over a mostly frozen North Platte River. We stood in a pasture on a mustang ranch and were surrounded by wild, roaming horses. We grew an enormous garden—when you’re living on a farm you have all the land you need. Two kids who had badly wanted to leave Nebraska figured out a way to find the good in it. Now I’m excited when I go back and visit. I see it differently.

Out of everything, though, the most valuable part of moving back home was how I got to rebuild my relationship with my parents. When you’re a bad teenager, either you do something major to restore your parents’ trust in you, or you live as strangers and live with the guilt.

Moving in with them at a time when I mostly had my life together changed everything between us. They were around me as I went to work and lived as an adult. My mom and I usually left the house for town at about the same time. I talked to them about the stories I was working on—a strike at the sugar factory, a protest at the Native American reservation across the Nebraska-South Dakota border,  a change in state legislation banning hog farms from dumping in trout streams.

We drank wine together at dinner and I would get them to talk to me about their childhood. We’re friends now. Equals. It never would have happened if I had been too proud to move back home.

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I have enjoyed and taken inspiration from these sixty seconds for many months now. This is really astonishing, inspirational commerce-art:

The spot is called “O’ Pioneer” and it is one of the core components of an ambitious marketing campaign put together by Levi’s and their advertising agency, Widen + Kennedy. The campaign went live last year, ever so cleverly, on the Fourth of July and linked the Levi brand with a new and energetic take on the American dream. The ad at hand was directed by the up-and-coming filmmaker M. Blash; but the imagery was inspired, perhaps overseen, by veteran photographer Ryan McGinley, who also shot the print and outdoor materials for the campaign. The copy is actually poetry. It’s an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers” read all grainy and raspy by the Will Gear.

My praise for the spot is both straightforward and complex. Straightforward because electric (and patriotic) poetry overlaid onto fevered, sexually-charged visuals strikes all the right cords in my heart. The glammed up apocalyptic look and Christopher McCandless-esque models further resonate with me. And finally, that high voltage, that evangelically taut summons, flashed at the end (––Go Forth––) makes me want to get off my butt and do what I got to do.

Complex because what is occurring behind the scenes has a sophisticated and thoughtful design. How so? It invokes and coalesces so very much. It’s all here: History, Politics, and Art. July 1776 folds into February 2008: Jefferson and Obama merge. The visual motifs of McGiney revitalize the verse of Whitman. The gold rush pioneer morphs into the post-recession innovator or agent of change. All the while, the quintessentially American Levi brand and its quintessentially American values of self-reliance, hard work, independence, and hopefulness endure.

Yeah man, it just does. I gotta rip off these overpriced Italian jeans, zip on some Levi’s and hit the road.