I Love Horses (Blitzkrieg mix feat. V2)

[prog]

Another morning of waking up at circa noon and proceeding to do almost nothing all day long. Last week, on Wednesday, I had a great day cuz I was outta bed by 8 to dodge the street sweeper (who hasn't tagged me in months, yay), and ended up spending the morning working on stuff for several hours before toodling on into the office. And today I was looking forward to some fun research projects, but when I have my morning coffee at 1 p.m., and am bodily aware of the sun starting to set just a couple hours later? I'm not going to get anything started, nossir.

This ends today. Or so I have said to myself. Have I already linked to this article? It's got a lot of good advice I can try. Harsh, though.

To start things off, I have made a new alarm-clock sound that mixes a terrifying British air-raid siren with the "I Love Horses" song. This is my attempt to force myself into full wakefulness using a scary noise, but adding just enough non-scariness around the edge to prevent adrenaline injection, bowel voiding, etc. in the process. We'll see how well it works tomorrow.

(I tried looking for MP3s of the backmasked baby-scream that is said to be used by the .mil as an incapacitating sonic weapon, but couldn't find anything. (Except for rumors about backmasked Britney Spears songs.))

I think that my ideas about finding an alarm that's hard to shut off are wrongtreeuppengebarkers. When an alarm clock fails me, it's either because a) I have simply slept through it, and it has given up (both my clock radio and my cellphone give up after an hour of noisemaking) or b) I have managed to shut it off while still basically asleep. I now think that if I can just make myself really and truly awake through alarms, I will succeed.

The two things that make me snap awake from deep sleep are (a) pantshitting terror and (b) novelty. I have experienced (a) many times (though not lately, since my present apt doesn't have windows facing the right direction), where direct line-of-sight sunlight pouring through the first crack of my eyelids is immediately interpreted by my brain as NUCLEAR EXPLOSION and my first reaction to this unfortunate news is to sit straight up, like a movie character waking up from a nightmare. And (b) comes into play every time I set up a new alarm clock, with a new noise.

So, for a while, the horse/siren will probably succeed by filling both roles, but I don't know how long it can continue to work before it fails both counts due to sheer repetition. (The siren is already slightly less scary to me, just from my working with it.) If it stops working (as a third alarm, mind you, next to the radio and the cellphone) then I have other options. We'll see.

Comments

[jordanwillow.livejournal.com]

It seems likely that you've already tried this, because it sounds like you've been struggling with this for quite a long time-- but have you considered putting very loud alarms in other rooms, so that you have to get up and walk a distance in order to turn them off? Such that the walking wakes you? Maybe sound simply doesn't wake you up, though... or maybe you would sleepwalk into the other room, turn the alarm off, and then fall asleep on the floor next to the alarm.

My waking up problem isn't nearly as extreme as yours, but I do always put my alarm someplace I have to walk to. Otherwise it's useless.

[queue.livejournal.com]

I'm envisioning some kind of service where your computer fetches an MP3 file every morning and plays it. That MP3 file was previously created by someone else, and you get a different one every day or two. So it's not only novel, it's unexpected.

If you don't want to involve someone else, you could always just set up something that randomly plays a series of different sounds/clips, some frightening, some just bizarre.