Upon examining my apparent weekly schedule.

At the beginning of every semester, there's a period when it's not exactly clear what the week to week is going to look like. Things have to settle in and shake out before I know if my Mondays will typically have an open afternoon, and if Thursdays will usually be [expletive-ing] long ass days, or if this is just beginning of the semester schedule shenanigans.

Moreover--and this is most true in the second semester--there's usually a long long list of things that need to be finished. Letters written, assessments finished, travel proposals made. Projects that got started the previous semester and continue on in a most enervating way. So: on my long long long list of stuff I have to do, most of which like bad debt is coming home to roost in such a way that I feel that I must search my character and possibly the stability of my mental state for what exactly in the hell is or was--and probably will be, if things keep going like this--wrong with me, there is this item:

And the rub is: there are too damn many commitments, and most of them intractable. I can step away from a lot of things, but only once I have finished them. Or when I'm dead, I guess. And then, and only then, will I have the leisure to say: shall I stay on this committee or that? Shall I arrange to have tea with my friend in a half a year or so? And so forth. 

I have come to think of my schedule as a wall made of loose stones, but stones so exactly fitted together that there is no room, no leverage, no play, as it were, so much so that this diagram 

seems to be precisely it. Now: what is the equivalent in life of my metaphorical wedge?