One thing that me and Margaret Thatcher have in common, besides funneling money to paramilitary death squads in Ireland, is that we’re both up pretty late into the night consistently (or “were,” in Margaret Thatcher’s case, because she is actually dead!). Margaret Thatcher only slept four hours a night, which I can only take to mean that she did what I do consistently, which is slinking around the house at 2 a.m. and trying not to wake anybody up.
This wasn’t always who I was. It just so happens that my last semester (fingers crossed!) at Vassar College is one in which I consistently have no reason to get up before 11 a.m. most days and on Wednesdays, there is no wake up time at all. So I work well into the night on the reg.
I don’t recommend it—there’s almost zero chance that you can contact anyone about anything at 2 a.m. in this time zone and expect them to actually respond, which really sucks. My parents firmly exist in reality, and so they go to bed at 9 p.m. We’re in the same time zone, but functionally we live five time zones away from each other. Sometimes I wish my parents were from the West Coast because at midnight, there’d be a chance that they weren’t asleep and I could send them my funny musings and they could pretend that they’re funny more immediately. But alas, they live on New York time, and I live on Hawaii time.
This is how a typical late night goes:
11:45 p.m.
Hearing that library bell the second time is enough to lurch me out of my chair and onto the streets of Poughkeepsie.
12:30 a.m.
I’m back home, deep in the work. Really just locking in. Not thinking about Jimmy Fallon at all.
2 a.m.
This is usually when I get visited by three ghosts and they’re always sooooo moralistic. Cool it with the didactic shit about why I suck, let’s play Fortnite instead and not think about Jimmy Fallon.
3 a.m.
This is peak scurrying/slinking time. The hunger really sets in at 3 a.m. so I go downstairs to the kitchen. I’m so hungry I could eat an entire horse but my pantry only has raisins. I’m very hungry so naturally, I’m thinking about food and not Jimmy Fallon.
4 a.m.
This is usually the time that I contemplate the fact that me and Jimmy Fallon are experiencing the same night at the same hours, which is really magical. I recently looked up on the interwebs if there was any public information about when Jimmy Fallon goes to bed every night so we could go to bed at the same time (which hopefully is earlier than when I currently go to bed) so it could be like our thing that only I know but maybe one day when we finally meet I could tell him and then it could be our thing together, and it would be this really special moment between us that we would remember for the rest of our lives. Since it’s 2025, my Google search about when Jimmy Fallon goes to bed was punctuated with a condescending AI response:
“While there’s no publicly available information about Jimmy Fallon’s exact bedtime, ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’ tapings typically end around 6:30 P.M., meaning he likely goes to bed sometime after that, possibly in the early evening.”
Such a wide window! What am I supposed to do with that??? They’re not even sure he’s getting through the whole show!! A lot of the AI replies read to me like how you would answer a kid when they ask you an impossible question and you’re just sort of grasping at nothing in trying to answer. This one in particular almost sounds like it’s trying to justify the concept of early bedtimes too. “7:00 is a perfectly reasonable bedtime to have. ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’ tapings typically end around 6:30 P.M., meaning he likely goes to bed sometime after that, possibly in the early evening, just like you, Sport!” Screw off, AI! You’re not my mom! Sometimes I’d rather they just tell me the answer’s just not there. Stop trying to answer the unanswerable. The internet doesn’t know when Jimmy Fallon goes to bed and I have to accept that.
4:01 a.m.
I sleep.