For decades my sleep pattern was to get about six hours, midnight or 1 am to 6 or 7 am. Over the last couple of years I’ve taken a one-hour nap around 2 or 3 pm on the couch. But every now and then (i.e., usually when I’m really stressed about something) I’ll become a fitful sleeper, and that means a 3 or 3:30 or 4 am wake-up, which always results in (a) moving to the living room couch for a 90-to-120-minute Twitter session. (b) finally returning to sleep around 6 or 6:30 am, and (c) waking again at 9 or even 9:30 am.

Tatyana and Arianna Huffington say it’s better to get at least seven if not eight hours straight. While I recognize the soundness of that advice, I have this nonsensical, deep-down notion that overnight slumber is a little slice of death, and that if I sleep too much I’ll miss stuff, and that too much sleep is for losers — the horizontal equivalent of taking extra-long showers.

Last night was particularly bad. I fell asleep on the couch during the second hour of Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, and then stumbled into the bedroom and tossed and turned for 90 minutes. And then, Tatyana tells me, I began snoring, which in my book is 100% unforgivable. (I told her this morning that “if this happens again, wake me up and kick me out of the bedroom…seriously.”) And then I woke up at 4 am and did the standard fitful — Twitter, back to sleep at 6:30 or 7 am, wake up at 9 or 9:30 am.

I go through periods, in other words, in which I am almost Al Pacino in Insomnia. But not quite.