Rewrite field Output / PHP Customfield / Date Field

Can I select the input format in the rewrite field output? I need to include some jquery and have some of the values in a fews field be used in my jquery. The problem with that is I believe it wraps each field in a span so it would have to use the raw text data. I am trying to get a date from a node's event date field and use the date in a jquery countdown script. Here is the code (the tokens are not right but you get the idea:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
  jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    $('#countdown_dashboard').countDown({
      targetDate: {
        'day': 		[day],
        'month': 	        [month],
        'year': 	        [year],
	'hour': 	        [hour],
	'min': 		[minute],
	'sec': 		[second],
      },
      'omitWeeks': true
    });
  });
</script>

So then I had the idea of adding a PHP Customfield to achieve this, adding this code to it:

<?php
$full_date = $data->node_data_field_event_date_field_event_date_value;
print_r($full_date);

$second = substr($full_date, -2, 2);
$minute = substr($full_date, -5, 2);
$hour = substr($full_date, -8, 2);
$day = substr($full_date, -11, 2);
$month = substr($full_date, -14, 2);
$year = substr($full_date, -19, 4);

echo "<script language=\"javascript\" type=\"text/javascript\">
  jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    $('#countdown_dashboard').countDown({
      targetDate: {
        'day': 		$day,
        'month': 	        $month,
        'year': 	        $year,
	'hour': 	        $hour,
	'min': 		$minute,
	'sec': 		$second,
      },
      'omitWeeks': true
    });
  });
</script>
";
?>

The problem is, for some reason, when I print out $full_date which is equal to '$data->node_data_field_event_date_field_event_date_value', it returns 2010-10-09 00:00:00 when it should return 2010-10-08 00:19:00. It's a day ahead and has no time. When I add the same field to views, I get the correct date and time, which is very odd.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I might solve this? I have been working on this for two days no and cannot seem to find a solution.

Thanks!

(oh, and I have already posted an issue similar to this in the Customfield module's issue queue but I didn't think that was the appropriate place for this.)