On Being A Night Person

by Marko Peric

It's one of the oldest clichés in the book, but it takes all kinds to make a world, and we're all one of the many kinds. Me, I'm a night person. No, this doesn't mean I'm some sort of wannabe vampire who's afraid of sunlight and doesn't set foot outside before dusk. I work a lot of evenings, and I usually can't sleep until several hours after work, so I'm up at odd hours. If you've ever happened to check my site in the wee hours of the morning, you'll find that's usually when new content appears. As I write this now, it's after 3:00 am and I have to work at 10:00. So I have to be up in less than six hours, but I'm probably not going to bed until this is finished. That's classic night person behaviour.

What does it mean to be a night person, you ask? It means you don't sleep when the rest of the world does. It means you don't get up at 7:00 am, not ever. It means you don't get up in the morning at all when you don't have to.

Why am I a night person? There's any number of reasons I could trace it to, but I mostly blame it on work. I used to work shift work at a 24 hour gas station/convenience store, and I worked a lot of nights, so that got me accustomed to being up at ridiculous hours. I realized that there are actually a fair number of people who are out and about in the middle of the night, and not just the late night weekend bar crowd. The only night that hardly anyone was in between midnight and 6:00 am was Sunday night. There was one guy who was in every other night of the week apart from Sunday, usually after 2:00 am. He'd have a coffee or two, skim the Auto Trader for a while, eat a pastry and a couple of those licorice cigars. Sure, there were some odd people who are night folks, but there were lots of basically normal ones, too, apart from the fact that they kept unusual hours. But I'm digressing, this is supposed to be about why I'm a night person, not someone else.

What does one do at night when one isn't sleeping? Well, as I've found out in the past, house repairs are a poor choice. But most any activity that doesn't cause undo noise is okay. Often I'll watch TV or movies, or play online games or surf the web, sometimes all at once. When I feel sufficiently inspired, and sometimes even when I don't, I work on this site. I'll read for hours at a stretch at times. Nothing particularly unusual, just that I'm doing it after midnight.

Will I always be a night person? Probably not. If I had a job that required me to be at work for 9:00 am five days a week, I couldn't really stay up late all the time and hope to function normally. Since I don't, there's no prevailing reason for me to be a day person. All my friends and family are at work during the day, so it's not like I could hang out with them. Sure, I could read, but there's only so much to read. You can't really watch TV in the morning, unless you're into Regis and The View, and if I sat around watching my DVDs at 11:00 am, well, that's a lot stranger than watching them at 1:00 am, isn't it?

I'm mostly an indoor night person. I'm not usually out and about much past midnight, although the fact that there's only so much to do outdoors at night, especially in the winter, has something to do with that. In the summer sometimes I'll go for a walk at 11:30. My neighbourhood is quiet and at night there's zero traffic, you can walk down the middle of the road if you want. Other times — not often, but sometimes — I'll go for a drive late at night, usually not terribly far, and often with no particular route in mind. I'll just drive. There's no one else on the road at 3:00 am, you can drive as fast or slow as you want, and I find it soothing to drive with no other cars to worry about. You can just drive. And that's one of the best things about being out at night.