Girl Talk - Column

Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been 33 years since my last confession and, quite frankly, we have a lot to discuss.
Are you online right now?
The first thing I have to confess is that God and I don't chat nearly as often as we ought. Partly, it's because I'm a busy girl. Lately I've found one status update on Facebook to be far more efficient than 15 phone calls, but the absolution of my mortal soul has required a little more work ... until now.
For the modest investment of $2.48, I now have a pocket priest who comes with me everywhere and absolves me of my sins at convenient times, such as when I'm waiting in a long lunch line at Subway or sitting at my desk waiting for a download. It sure beats early starts on Sunday mornings.
"Confession: A Roman Catholic App" is a bargain at any price and, as far as iPhone applications go, it's a Godsend in every sense of the word.
While Seventh Day Adventists patiently knock on locked doors touting for lost souls and Anglicans wait for the sins to come to them, the forward-thinking Catholics are actively plugging for business and soliciting sins online with an application that facilitates confession in the most beautifully efficient and succinct 21st-century way.
After a rough start which saw me forced to choose "single" as my vocation (not perhaps the one I'd dreamed of as a bright-eyed young girl full of hope for the future, but nevertheless marginally better than the available alternatives of "married" or "priest"), I was asked to enter the date of my last confession (err, sorry God, been a bit slack there) and then I was away.
An "Examination" section asked me to tick any sins from a long (long, long, long) list before sending me off to online confession.
Admitting I had on occasion taken the Lord's name in vain and worked the odd Sunday when I didn't really have to was easy enough. But like any multi-choice test, the easy questions soon made way for the gnarly ones; had I engaged in sex outside marriage, did I always dress modestly, had I indulged in impure thoughts? Well, the answers to those questions remain strictly between me, God and my iPhone, but it's fair to say the phone's microprocessor took a hit when the completed list was uploaded to God and my act of contrition was eventually sent back.
A few online "amens" later and a nifty little automated missive from St Thomas Aquinas and I was done. The list of ticks was wiped clean and I was all gussied up and ready to be good again.
But this immediately drew to my attention one big, fat, glaring flaw with the Roman Catholic App: after paying top dollar for the download and thoroughly enjoying the well-designed and interactive experience, I wanted to use it again.
To do that, however, I really needed to clock up a few more naughty little sins. How was a girl to do that at 8.30am on a Tuesday?
Fortunately, I had yet to take advantage of the "custom sins" section, which allowed me to tap in my own wicked misdemeanours and get them wiped off the slate as well.
So now all I have to do is misbehave a bit and the game can begin again. I'm not sure that's entirely the outcome the Catholic bishops had in mind, but I'm sure they'll forgive me. And Glory Be To God for that.