That night was the celebration of my friends' and my very own birthday, and we decided to spend it on the rocky shores of Lake Michigan .

I was drunk. I admit it. We all were. Being the people that we are, we had the insight, the vision – no, the genius, to record the whole evening on videotape. You know, in case we came across the meaning of life , or some “truth” equally as useful, and we wanted to share it with world.

Encoded on those tapes were faces, friends, places, stories and, due to our lack of thumb agility and the confusing placement of certain red buttons, these tapes all include all the time and events in between. And by “in between,” I mean events that happened not during the parts of the night that I actually remember. The following morning, despite the nagging and ever-growing pain in my head, I crawled over to the camera to discover it had recorded multiple hours of debauchery. How was this possible? Even if we had recorded every inane situation from the night before, which we had, we weren't at it for a very long time, right? Time code doesn't lie .

You've heard it before. When you are sitting with someone you like, time seems to pass very quickly. The converse of this is also true: If you are with someone you don't particularly enjoy, time will seem to stand still. Perhaps it was the company, or perhaps it was the large amounts of alcohol, but either way, what I did manage to remember from the evening seemed to pass by in the blink of an eye.

The videotape told me otherwise. Why the hell is time out to get us? Why does it insist on affecting us in such different ways, allowing us to measure it differently in a certain context? It's a simple question with a complicated answer, so let's just start with this: How in the hell do we measure this worldwide convention, this mistress of memory, time?

Low Tech: Rotation of the Earth

It seems simple, right? There are 24 hours in a day because that is how many hours it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis.

This statement is wrong . A flat-out lie. Instead of correcting it, we have just invented cover-ups, hence leap ears . Being that we just had a leap day and that I, myself, was born on a leap day, let me explain.

In all of this discussion, remember the sun is time's inadvertent corrupter. Not since Superman 4 has the sun been a source of this much misfortune. When the earth spins on its axis, we calculate a full rotation by watching the sun; this is estimated to be 24 hours. The problem with this estimation is that while the earth was rotating on its axis, it was also following its orbital path around the sun. Simply, we were at point A when we started the rotation and we are at point B when finished. That difference in position is about 1 degree of our orbital path, equal to about 4 minutes. Confused?

Look up at the stars. Pick one . If you were to locate it in the sky, start a stopwatch and didn't stop until that same star was in the very same location the following night, your stopwatch would read 24 hours and 4 minutes. That's because we are not orbiting around the rest of the stars, just one and we call it the sun. If you're still confused , too bad. We're moving on.

So on to the next myth to debunk: that it takes 365 days to orbit the earth. If you watch the stars instead of the sun, you'll see that it takes 365.242199 days to orbit the sun. If looking at the sun is making our time calculation wrong, why do we do it?

Unless you're one of the idiots who went out and bought a star so they would name it after you, what have the stars ever done for you? Now, what has the sun ever done for you? In fact, the sun has done a lot. You regulate your life by it. Assuming you're not a vampire, you more or less rise with the sun to start your day and settle down as it sets. Again, more or less, people. I know all about drinking and how it destroys this sentence).

Because of humanity's link to the sun, we use it to tell what is called civil time. But what about those extra 4 minutes every day? Quick calculations: A year is really 365.242199 days. If we add an extra day every four years, then it gives civil time an average of 365.25 days to orbit the sun. Pretty damn close, even for government work. It gets better, and it takes a man born on leap year to expose this one.

Look back in your calendars to the year 1900 . You'll see there was no leap day that year. But why? It is a year divisible by four, right? Well, even if your math skills do not disappoint, there is another rule that helps civil time keep pace with reality. There is only a leap year at the beginning of centuries if that year is divisible by 400. Yes, 2000 had it but not 1900, or 1800 for that matter. What this does is bring the year average for civil time to an astounding close 365.2425 days a year.

So we've exposed humanity's affinity to the sun and shown our clever little tricks of making time fit into our need to bask in the rays of our closest star. But we've also shown how it is still imprecise. Among other imperfections, the earth's rotation is slowing down. But that's a whole other story. So how are you ever expected to be on time? What about all those devices that need accurate-to-the-millisecond time stamps, like astronauts or even the damn phone companies? How do they keep time?

High Tech: Atomic Clocks

You've seen them in the The Sharper Image catalog, the precision clocks that tell the most accurate time. And at the low low price of only $49.95. Don't be misguided; this isn't an atomic clock. Read the fine print. These clocks actually just tune into the U.S. Atomic Clock's WWVB radio signal in Colorado . To explain, let's start with what the hell an atomic clock is in the first place.

Like many discoveries in the world, the invention of the atomic clock is a little arcane. For our purposes, we are not going to question the boring lives of some people and their pursuit of strange, but useful, technologies.

With that said, this is how it works: Scientists take a tube and fill it with cesium atoms. They heat up those atoms and then, using a magnet, run a frequency through them. At a specific frequency, cesium atoms change their electric state at an impressive rate of one pulse per second. An analogy: If I took a whole bunch of fat kids and gave them all enough food – just the right amount of food, mind you – that they all began throwing up at the rate of one upchuck per second, then I'd be a sick asshole. But you get the picture.

There are a number of different elements that have this wonderful phenomenon, but the cesium atom has the most long-time accuracy, millions of times more accurate than staring at the sun. So we have clocks now that won't become slow or go too fast, but what about that whole rotation-of-the-earth situation? Glad you asked.

Because the atomic time is exact and precise, we can figure out the difference exactly between atomic time and solar time: It's about 0.07 seconds a year. But remember that other story I told you about how the earth's rotation is slowing down. It's true. It is slowing down at a rate of 0.02 seconds a year. Add it up, kiddies . This means the atomic clock is off from our idea of the sun-based time by 0.09 seconds every single year. Enter the leap second.

Every year, since the atomic clock became the standard means of time measurement in the United States , we have to add 1 millisecond to the atomic clock to keep it in line with solar time. The reason for this is obvious: it's a hell of a lot easier to adjust a clock that we build than to fix the rotation of the earth. But in the end, even our most accurate of time telling devices is still subjugated to our need to enjoy the sun and its cancerous UV rays.

Don't forget those “atomic clocks” from The Sharper Image. The U.S. government broadcasts from Colorado on radio waves the exact time that the U.S. Naval atomic clock is displaying. The Sharper Image clock is always listening for that radio signal and adjusting itself accordingly.

Conclusion:

All we've done here is present the case that, despite our best technological efforts, time really is subjective. Or as some famous guy once said, relative . I think his name was Al.

I guess it brings me back to that night that we recorded every drunken moment, worthy and unworthy alike. Time, which I've always thought of as an objective convention, was really subjective that night, at least to me. But when you really look at it, time is and always has been subjective. Your time is really what you make of it.