Make no mistake: I'm a night person. I work in the afternoons and late evenings, and when I come home from work, I don't go straight to bed like many so-called "respectable" people would. I stay awake, because it seems right and natural. Going to bed at 11:30pm is for me like going to bed at 6pm would be for you.

A lot of people live like this, of course. My girlfriend Christa is an even later-shifted person than I am, and it takes convincing to persuade her to turn in before full daylight. And many other people of all walks of life stay up all night every night out of necessity or choice.

But there's one category of humans that generally doesn't end up on this type of schedule: children. As such, I rarely if ever have to deal with little kids. And therefore, I consider little kids to be perfectly insane.

Not so long ago, I had a weekend off -- an actual weekend falling on Saturday and Sunday. Everyone (well, everyone other than my fellow night-shifted friends) congratulated me, beaming with happiness for my new fortune. But let me give you a little bit of advice, buddy: On weekend afternoons, the world if full of children. And children are crazier than shithouse rats.

Here are a few of the things these people do that I consider to be sure signs of lunacy.

- Children never walk. They always run at top speed, and when they get to where they are going, they crash into a wall. Likewise, they rarely talk in normal tones, choosing instead to shriek their thoughts at full volume. If these aren't the symptoms of a raving mad psychopath, I don't know what is.

- Children roller skate indoors. I swear, one time at the supermarket, the kids without wheels on their shoes were heavily in the minority. I nearly got knocked over five times by these little demons. No one else seemed to notice. But I had six digits of the nuthouse phone number dialed, with my thumb paused on the seventh.

- When given the choice between a breakfast cereal proven to combat heart disease, and one that has a deranged chicken on the box, children will choose the deranged chicken cereal 100% of the time. Because they're batty.

- Kids actually believe that a rabbit can deliver candy to everyone in the world in one night. Some people might argue that this only proves that children are stupid, not crazy. I disagree -- they're obviously both.

Now, while all of this is true, and kids really do freak me out, I can't say the same for babies. Babies laugh, cry, shit and piss their pants, and have trouble holding up their own head let alone walking. I've spent enough time in bars to know that this is perfectly normal behavior.

Well, for night people at least.