Who needs a watch?

Today I thought about time. I came up with lots of alternative ways to tell time, rather than using the traditional system of seconds, minutes and hours. All of my ideas were subjective, but here are a few possible ways to measure time: the number of times I see someone wearing an outfit I like, the number of times I think that I'm hungry, the number of times I see something unusual.

I had two favorite techniques for time-telling. The first one is measuring time by the number of people that walk by. I like this because it implies that life goes faster when it's busy and slower when it's not. It would also mean that time moves at different rates throughout the universe (really fast in Times Square, no pun intended, and slow on top of Mount Everest). This method brings up questions like whether we should count animals toward time-telling, and it obviously touches on relativity and philosophy too.

My other favorite method was telling time by the number of leaves that fell from a nearby tree. (Ex: "I talked to my friend for seven leaf-falls.") This idea is really interesting because trees only lose leaves for a few weeks of the year, so you'd have to measure time differently during the other seasons. BUT (this is where it gets good) you couldn't even define a "season" because your foundation for time-telling is based on the leaves falling. So what would happen once they were all gone--would time not exist during the winter? But then how could winter itself exist? It's quite the paradox.