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It always seems like there's never enough time; it's always been working against me one way or the other. There isn't enough, entirely too much, inopportune inevitabilities, et cetera. Time's never on my side, and it doesn't seem to be for most people... "When you want it, it goes away too fast; times you hate it always seem to last." One of the few lines that could have been used to dictate reality and I wouldn't have noticed the difference. It slips by like water through my hands... I slip through, I suppose would be more realistic.

Time travel, time dilation, human perception, gravitational warping, et al. So many phenomena seem to affect the very concept of time itself, and, ironically, time is still the only barrier between us and a full understanding of time. Seconds pass, minutes tick by, hours creep along, days drag their proverbial feet, years obdurately refuse to pass, and then you're 17, when yesterday you're 16. Last week you were 12; a month ago you still had your pacifier; and a year seems inconcievable. Yet the passing of time is unyeilding, cessationless, unrelenting.

Then, I ask, what is time? A gluon passes from quark to quark, seemingly transferring an unseen force, while its virtual brother, the anti-gluon, passes in the opposite direction; not only through space, but many think through time itself. I sleep and dream, I wake and my dream is realized down to the last detail; every word, every letter, exactly the same, yet how could I have surpassed that which bounds me for the duration of my existence? A trip on a plane and, unbeknownst to you, your watch is now slower by several milliseconds, depending on the trip. You take a step forward, your body lunges, your velocity increases, kinetic and potential energy spike, and, once again unknown to you, you slow the passage of time itself. You leap in the air, climbing futilely away from the gravitational warp of the Earth with all the might your effectively fragile limbs can muster; time accelerates, you not only climb upward, but forward through time.

Every action manipulates the passage of this elusive aether, yet we remain slaves to its omnipresent power, biding our time as we search for the deeper meaning to that which prevents such acquisitions of information. Our memories, our perception of time, just a compilation of neural and biochemical responses to extraneous stimuli grafted into the denser regions of our various cortecies. A series of images fused with sound and innate endocrinological response, altered only by the faculties of our conscious and subconscious minds in manners that currently and probably indefinately, if not inexplicably, are vague, mysterious, and unpredictable. Even the precieved 'now' is just a potpourri of our most recent successfully processed neuro-chemical responses, with little actual bearing on the objective 'now' -assuming there is one- aside from what predictions we can derive about the 'future', only relevant after it becomes the 'now' of the 'past' beyond reach by our minds.

Considering the relative and somewhat confusing nature of time, what assumptions can we really make about it? Thought to be absolute, destroyed by Einstien, and still his downfall. Is it a dimension? Does existence itself rest on the uni-dimensional reality we know as 'time', or is it two dimension -past and future, with the now representing their intersection? Is it just the illusion of an absolute created by the current state of reality, or percieved reality, in referrence to memories of the past tangible only in the now as neuronal arrangements near the outer regions of our minds? Is it beyond the scope of human comprehension, beyond representation within the bounds of our reality except as the 'inevitable' progression of events toward some unknown conclusion that may or may not exist in any logical sense of the word? What happens to the past, where's the future, wait, there goes the 'now', now the past, the present consumed by the future once more, only to do the same a seemingly infinite number of times...

Only so many minutes in a day, yet do these incriments of time really mean anything? I am currently inclined to say, "no", but that may only be because I've just wasted quite a number of them typing this rambling paragon of drivel... Woot for rambling.