Invention is the Daughter of Grogginess

The Brian that exists in the foothills between sleep and within just 120 seconds or so of the alarm going off - that guy is the laziest fucking guy this world has ever seen.

I have a real problem with keeping a normal schedule. I am just so accustomed to going to sleep around 2 or so, and waking up around 10 or so (or later on weekends), that my inability to wake up at the sound of the alarm clock is absurdly high. I tried to solve this problem by getting a super loud alarm clock. In fact, one that has a connected thing that you slip under your mattress, that pulsates and actually shakes you awake. But to the person I am just moments after I wake up, absolutely anything is justifiable. There are no moral codes, no motivating reasons to possibly leave the bed. I was late to work every single day last week. It is pathetic. Even though my alarm is really loud and shakes everything, and even though I have my phone alarm as the backup, I can still turn both of those off virtually in my sleep, and not even remember afterwards having done so.

Today I actually got up early, and was even able to eat breakfast(!) while watching some HBO on demand before showering and getting to work...due to having to get up early to help move a car. But when there aren't extenuating circumstances, how can I manage to get up?

What I really need is a kind of alarm clock that forces me to be awake for a few minutes; at which point my superego kicks into gear and tells myself "no, don't go back to bed, start moving around." I don't think such a thing exists, so I have hit upon an invention: an alarm clock that requires you to solve some kind of puzzle before you can turn it off. Even something just like simple math problems...if you had to calculate what 104 divided by 6 was before the beeping would stop, for example. You would have to get your brain into working order, no getting around it. I'd market this idea, but I don't know if there enough people out there like me whose ability to perform basic tasks was so compromised that they needed wacky gadgets to get up in the morning.