masochistic alarm clock tactics

So, it having been the Fourth of July earlier today (or yesterday if you want to be picky), I was planning on writing about the movie I have all planned out in my head that I would definitely make in the future if my life were taking a different course, but I had this conversation today at a barbecue about alarm clocks that really got me thinking. We were all talking about what we do to get up in the morning, all the little alarm clock tactics, like placing them on the other side of the room so you have to run across the room to turn them off, perhaps combined with setting it as radio on the fuzziest channel at the highest volume so that you literally shoot out of your bed when the alarm goes off. For whatever reason, when my friend Tom phrased his sentence, "to help me wake up" something triggered in my head and I thought this thought: here we are, all talking about these somewhat painful things we subject ourselves to voluntarily, passing it off as "helping ourselves" in some obscure way. I know, I realize it's important to wake up and stuff, but if you'll follow me on my tangent for a moment, it seems like we (at least I) very willingly go to extra unnecessary (and notedly painful) measures voluntarily and call it good. Is that just some strange form of masochism in some way? After thinking about my "radio static" technique, it does seem to share a lot of qualities with good old-fashioned masochism. It does have that quality of "it's painful but I like it" or "it's bad, but it's actually really good in some way," in very much the same way that affinity for spicy foods (you know, the really spicy ones that hurt) works. This whole line of reasoning just brought me to wonder how many other painful things I voluntarily submit myself to in the name of its possibly unreasonably ascribed goodness, and go so far as to be blinded from its actual painfulness. If hot sauce and shocking static radio count, I'm sure there's others.

Then again, maybe I'm just thinking too hard and trying to find something profound in something that isn't profound.

On that note, I have observed about myself that I really really like profound ideas, so much that I'm biased towards wanting to find profound ideas as often as possible. This most likely causes me to consider many things profound that are, in fact, very ordinary. Ironically I find the realization of this fact quite profound.