Nap? Nope

I'm not a nap person. Never have been. I just don't like the idea of sleeping in the middle of a perfectly good weekend day when there are other, more valuable things I could be doing. Things like watching Hudson Hawk on Comedy Central or televised poker on any of the 73 channels that show it every weekend. Important stuff that shouldn't be slept through.
I had all of this reinforced Saturday afternoon when, for the first time in years, I decided there was little enough else going on I could lie back on the couch and close my eyes for a while. I'm not sure why. It could be I was tired from the biking I'd done that morning. Or it could have been the fact Comedy Central really was showing Hudson Hawk, the terrible Bruce Willis vehicle from 1991. And it was the best thing on TV. Couldn't anybody get the rights to Ishtar?
But nothing about this nap went right. I closed my eyes at 1 p.m. and when I got up a few hours later I felt more tired than when I started. I had pillow marks on my face and I felt like I'd wasted most of an afternoon. I wasn't relaxed or refreshed at all. I might as well have spent three hours cleaning my bedroom or going for a walk or even writing this column. I don't know if the column would have made any more sense if I'd done it then, but on the bright side I'd probably be writing about something more interesting than naps.
Oh well. Live and learn, I guess.
I'm not sure what the problem was. Maybe I'm just not a very good napper. Presumably there was a time -- during pre-school, probably, or maybe even as recently as kindergarten -- when I was as good as anybody else at dozing during the afternoon. Maybe I'm just out of practice. I probably had flaws in my napping technique a more experienced napper never would have made.
Take my choice of nap location, for example. This particular couch was not especially long. I, on the other hand, am. My head was on one armrest but my legs stuck well beyond another. If I angled them right I could rest them on another couch set up nearby. Otherwise, my only choice was to curl up into a kind of fetal ball, a position that probably hasn't been great for getting rest since I actually was a fetus. I'm sure none of that was conducive to a restful afternoon.
Maybe I made other mistakes, too. The kind of errors only a true rookie napper would commit. Maybe I chose the wrong time of day. Would early afternoon have been better? Would I have had more success if I'd been sleeping through the late college football games rather than Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello mugging at the camera? Should I have closed the blinds? Turned off the lights? Turned more lights on?
Did I sleep too long? Did I doze beyond the boundaries of a true nap and into the realm of the too-short night's sleep?
I could ask someone, I suppose. I could find myself a nap guru and sit at his feet while he explains the finer points of catching 40 winks on a Saturday afternoon. My nephew will be five next month. I bet he knows a thing or two about this.
Or maybe I should just let it go. Maybe I'm just not ready to handle that kind of break in my day. Maybe, like I said at the start of this column, I'm just not a nap person.
Whatever the case, I need to do something to put all this behind me. All these questions are enough to keep a guy awake at night.