Hello. My name is Lashawn, and I am a night owl.

It’s four am, and what am I doing? Am I sleeping? Noooo. I’m sitting at my laptop in my badass penguin pajamas, playing with the Biblical Curse Generator. I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty entertained. It might be because it’s four in the morning, it might be because I’m slightly jacked up on caffeine, it might be because I enjoy the simpler things in life, I don’t know. What I do know is that the shit this site is coming up with is cracking me up. For example:

“May you see your pomegranates wither, O thou dabbler in abominations!”

Take that, guy who wanted to argue with me over the price of his oil change.

Staying up late opens your eyes to a whole new world dominated mostly by network syndicated comedies (such as How I Met Your Mother and That 70’s Show) and cheesy yet überslick infomercials for hair removal products and weird spandex bra shaper things that I don’t really need. Late nights make you feel classy, like you’re better than all the people who fell asleep during CSI: Miami. Horatio Caine peers at you over the top of his sunglasses and salutes you my friend, because you stayed up long enough to see him catch the bad guy and utter some really horrible and cheesy dialogue before and after he handcuffs said villainous villain. It’s a twofer kind of thing.

Horatio Caine: "There will be no tying of virtuous young maidens to any railroad tracks on my watch, evil silent film guy." Dastardly Evil Guy: "Curses, foiled again!"

Sleep? Ha, who needs sleep.

Sleep is overrated.

People often ask me why I stay up until the birds are chirping. I say why not? I work in the afternoon, my life is pretty boring…so why the hell not? I would much rather stay up late than wake up early in the morning, if that makes any sort of sense. I’ve always been a night person, even when I was a young lass. Nighttime is me time. I can shut off the Lashawn that the rest of the world gets to see and get in my pajamas and be the Lashawn who enjoys aloneness and contemplation and a good book or a corny sitcom.

I like the quiet, the solitude of what Robert Louis Stevenson called “the black hours”. I like that I can just sit and think and not have to be a mom or a sister or a receptionist or a friend or a daughter or anything that everyone else wants me to be. I can just be me, and not have to worry about what the rest of the world thinks. I can read random crap on Wikipedia or research the French Revolution or watch an old show from the ’50s. I can sit around with my favorite fleece blanket and eat Tostitos and salsa and not have to share. I can sit on my upstairs porch and just look up at the night sky and feel so infinitely insignificant and think philosophical things. It’s my favorite time of day, hands down.

To me, the night is beautiful, in some ways just as beautiful as the daytime, in other ways possibly more. One of my favorite things ever is when the sun sets and there’s this smooth, seamingless transition of blues and purples and pinks across the sky, from east to west. Simply beautiful. I adore the stars, and I think the twinkling, sparkling “heavens” are just as breathtaking as the white clouds across a vivid blue mid-afternoon sky. You can’t appreciate the sunshine without the inkiness of night. Sunrise wouldn’t be as memorable without the sunset. I’m suddenly reminded of one of my favorite quotes:

“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness so I can see the stars.”