It's 10:30 p.m. EST, and millions of mature, responsible American adults are nestled all snug in their beds. And I can't help but feel sorry for them. Asleep at 10:30? For crissakes, I've got three good, waking hours left, at least. While those poor sleepyheads are unconscious, I'm relishing my second wind, reading books, watching bad television, playing video games, surfing the Internet and generally frittering my life away.

Now, it's 10:30 a.m. EST the next day, and I'm practically taking coffee intravenously in a desperate attempt to stave off zombification. As I sit shell-backed and drowsy at my desk or in the subway, I usually promise myself I'll go to sleep earlier that night. But then, a couple of hours later, after I've regained a functional level of lucidity, I question why I went to sleep so early the night before, when I could have certainly eked out another half an hour or so. And so it goes. If you stay in this insomniatic tailspin long enough, you can succeed in reprogramming your circadian rhythm. But I don't think that "succeed" is really an apt term, because, as of yet, I haven't been able to pinpoint the benefits of staying up to 2 a.m. on weeknights. Sure, I've become a cineaste of big-budget B movies like Jurassic Park III and The Prophecy, and I've beaten Halo: Combat Evolved and NCAA Football 2003 for Xbox, but I'm not sure how this has bettered my life in any measurable way.

But I don't subscribe to Oprah's Magazine, so the absence of any self-improvement hasn't really bothered me since I started this night shift about eight years ago. At first, it was simply a commonsense adaptation to the relentlessly hostile environment of a college dorm. If you're living in a building constructed decades before the concept of personal privacy was born and the upperclassman next door considers Starship's canonical "We Built This City" to be bedtime music, then you don't go to sleep at normal hours, you improvise. Pretty soon, you're considering 1:30 a.m. "pretty early" and studiously avoiding classes that start before 11 a.m. Then it gets worse--you don't go out for coffee until after midnight, know the Denny's menu by heart and consider Benny Hinn's crack-of-dawn salvation show, "This Is Your Day," to be your favorite television program. And then you graduate, and are conscripted into the workaday world, which is populated by clones of that one weirdo on your hall who went to bed, unfailingly, at 9:30 every night. If you capitulate, it's lights out at 11 p.m., at the latest, but there is another way.

It's not easy, though. Staying up until you pass out from exhaustion in your work clothes, with your television and lights on, isn't all flash and glamour. There are consequences, and you may find yourself losing more than just sleep.

First of all, you have to realize that treating the first seventeen hours of your day as a prelude to the last three is a radically stupid approach to daily life. So, if you do decide to embrace this lifestyle, you have to resign yourself to a certain degree of social isolation at the workplace. For example, when people tell me that they go to sleep at 8 and get up at 4 in the morning, I literally have to stop talking to them. I just don't know how to relate to their existence, and fear I might say something ridiculous. The way I look at it, I have about as much in common with these people as I do with the homo sapiens that lived in Mesopotamia four thousand years before the birth of Christ--the cultural chasm that separates us is so vast that I cannot possibility communicate with them on a meaningful level.

Me: Did you watch The Bachelor last night?
Them: Oh, no, I usually go to sleep a little after Jeopardy, so I can get up and go to the gym before work.

I usually just walk away after that.

Thankfully, early birds of that variety are the minority. Unfortunately, I have similar trouble interacting with those Pavlovs who condition themselves to a needlessly rigid sleep schedule. Unless you are they taking your medical boards or competing in the Olympics the next day, is eight hours of sleep an absolute necessity? Seriously, how mentally alert and physically rested does one have to be to mail in another day at the office? If it's 1 a.m. and I happen to stumble upon a guilty pleasure like Bram Stroker's Dracula or Play Misty for Me on one of our 57 available HBOs, I can't possibly hold myself to a predetermined bedtime. Hit the sack before Anthony Hopkins chews scenery as Doctor Van Helsing? That just wouldn't be right.

Eventually, you begin to realize that your growing sense of nausea at your co-workers and their bourgeoisie, eight-hours-of-sleep-a-night worldview is really the least of your concerns. No, the real problem is your almost vampiric inability to operate during the day, especially before noon. I used to delude myself into thinking that my late night vigils were productive because I'd often pass the time puttering around the web reading about historical esoterica, like the name given to the European period of the French Indian War. And then it hit me: when somebody calls you to ask about a client's capitalization at 9:15 morning, the correct answer is never "the Seven Years War," nor is it ever "Um, can I call you back on that?" Not only is this trivia almost always useless, you're likely to attract untoward attention if you choose to impart any of your nocturnal learning. If you answer a colleague's casual question about the origins of Halloween with an actual answer, people will look at you like you've got a "Born Again Pagan" bumper sticker on your forehead. And it's not as if you can explain that you just happened to know that because you stay up until 3 a.m. looking up that kind of stuff on the Internet because you find it "interesting." Best to just to keep your mouth shut.

So why stay up so late? There's really no answer for that. Maybe, you've grown attached to that graveyard shift lifestyle you adopted in college, and old (and bad) habits really do die hard. Or, maybe you realized that the old chestnut about being "healthy, wealthy and wise" is only half true--early to bed and early to rise can also make you really boring. Believe me, I've seen it happen. There are more, equally unconvincing reasons, but I think I'll wrap it up here. After all, it's 10:30 p.m., and I've still got at least three hours left.