I felt no pain. I thought that having a line attached to my head would have been agonizing, but it wasn't. I also thought the weight of my body dangling from my skull would be painful, but that didn't hurt either. Not in the least.

I thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience. I kicked and shuffled my useless feet; no one could tell that I was suspended from an invisible helicopter.

1. Photographers are the best editors of their own work.

2. Photographers are their own best writers/designers.

3. Photographers are good printers.

4. Commerce is corrupt; art is pure.

5. Photography is all about talent and instinct.

6. The it-has-been-done-before syndrome.

7. Critics and theorists are useful to photographers.

8. You should not photograph in foreign cultures.

9. Documentary photography is not art.

I thought the authors made strong arguments in each case. I asked another recovering photographer if he was familiar with photographic myths.

"Of course," he replied. "There's Myth Cunningham, Myth Lange, and Myth Liebowitz, for starters. Are those the ones you were thinking of?"

There's no doubt about it: photography is a mythical medium.

Why is it the military types come up with such great acronyms? I suppose officers have a lot of spare time between wars. Idle tongues are the devil's workshop, and all that.

Everyone's heard of SNAFU, but a lot of people don't know it's an acronym for "Situation Normal, All Fucked Up."

Calvin taught me a new MA (Military Acronym) today.

Me: "Calvin, why are you installing five quadranet hubs? I thought they only worked in hierarchical pairs."

Calvin, with a shrug: "FIGMO."

Me, quizzically: "FIGMO?"

Calvin, authoritatively: "Fuck It, Got My Orders."

I wonder if there are any MAs without an F?

Today, though, it seems that most fortune cookies aren't. They are cookies, of course, but silly sayings have supplanted fortunes.

For example, these are the last three "fortunes" I received after my last three Chinese dinners:

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

Birds are entangled by their feet and men by their tongues.

The sparrow with two nests has no home.

I dislike being immodest, but this is the truth: all my rich friends ask me how not to work. What can I say? Slothfulness is an art; you either have it or you don't. I do, they don't.

But, of course, they could.

I told Judy I was thinking of starting an indolence clinic to rescue busy rich people; she advised against it.

"I bet you would be good at deprogramming the worker bees," she said, "but then you'd end up making too much money yourself, and you'd eventually be as miserable as they are."

I always appreciate advice from friends, especially when it's good advice.

"What would it take to get the Beatles back together again?"

(Silence.)

"Three more bullets!"

Everyone pretends not to hear me. Everyone except Lucile, that is.

Lucile is laughing, laughing and grimacing at the same time. She's just had some sort of back or rib operation, and it's physically painful for her to laugh.

I tell a few more jokes, and the constant comic universal variable prevails: everyone suffers.

But there's one critical bit of information, not quite a priori knowledge, that Victor almost always fails to impart: photographic paper is sensitive to light. And so it is that one or two students each semester inspect their box of photograph paper before they get to the darkroom.

Kids these days!

I think Victor feels bad about his omission, but I believe there's no better way to teach youngsters about the most essential quality of photographic paper.

Ms. Olsen suggested that we only measure the past in decades. The future, according to her observations, is only measured in years or even smaller increments of time.

I fear that Wendy Olsen, of Great Pine Plains, Minnesota, is right.