Pop quiz, which is the biggest sin?

A) Missing Mass on Easter Sunday

B) Because you were out until five in the morning on Holy Saturday

C) Hooking up with a person you’d known for under an hour who was wearing a sunvisor. Inside. Backwards. At night.

All glory, laud, and honor
That is correct: I celebrated the Resurrection of Our Lord by shaking it at a beachside bar until dawn, rolled in the sand with a guy I’d known exactly 45 minutes, slept through Easter morning, and had chocolate for lunch.

I did, however, access my partner’s full name, if not his street address (“Just to make sure we’re not related here? Great. Thanks. Okay, commence feeling me up.”)

See, it could have been worse.

The morning after
It is one thing to behave in an unladylike fashion on what Jimmy Buffett calls that “thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.” It is quite another to do so with perpetrators of sunvisor abuse.

“That was horrible,” I said to my friends as we drove, sand-covered, back to our place of origin. “That was normal,” I was told. “You’re simply doing what you never did when you were nineteen.

I didn’t care what I was supposed to be doing, or not doing, in college; that was horrible. Who was that guy? What was his mother’s maiden name? Was he a Gore voter? Oh, God, I just made out with a Gore voter.

From here to mediocrity
“Just another chapter for the book,” I told myself as I shook half of Melbourne Beach out of the pockets of my shorts. But it was worse than that.

It was less.

This is not, as you may have gathered, the type of thing I do often. I have notched on my lipstick case exactly one other one-nighter that began as an interview, ended at his place, and quickly oozed into a multi-month saga of not receiving hoped-for phone calls and a sharp, peculiar “but we had such a connection” agony that I do not care to repeat.

Indiana Jones was right
It’s not the distance, it’s the mileage. I endured more pain from The Boyfriend That Never Was than I experienced from the collapse of actual meet-the-parents relationships. Where the heart is invested, time matters not.

Such was not the case with Visor Boy. I was a piece of?well, you know. He was a piece of?also, you know. We used each other.

But mutual using does not an okay hook-up make.

It was empty. I kissed him and felt nothing. He told me I was pretty, and I felt even less. We held one another and I felt? just enough comfort to really, really miss this type of thing with a person I truly cared about.

Father, forgive me
I was in confession so fast.

I expected an upbraiding and got amusement.

“For your penance,” the priest said, “go to Mass. And find a better date.” He might well have added, “And a higher dosage of Valium.”

Find a better date? As long as hook-ups are out there, this might be the toughest penance assignment I’ve ever had.