Hinton teenager and is too focused on survival to spend much time on familiar Y.A. preoccupations like cliques and crushes.
Subplots involving modern preoccupations like AIDS cocktails and fertility treatments mix with ageless themes of destiny, lost innocence and rebirth.
Well, one should be, perhaps... but many of the citizens have other preoccupations, like show business, fame and material wealth.
The government has got itself into political trouble by getting bogged down in niche preoccupations – like the fight it has picked on the Racial Discrimination Act changes, (a key Bolt bugbear).
But Newsday's editors believe that they cannot do Queens justice without covering New York politics and its preoccupations, like the shooting of Amadou Diallo or the vaporization of Silicon Alley jobs.
The extortion, which prosecutors said was an effort to get Mr. Seagal to pay as much as $3 million from his film work, was a foray into Hollywood by Mr. Ciccone's crew that gave a dash of drama to what was otherwise a grim case of typical mob preoccupations, like collecting debts and handpicking waterfront union officials who would answer to underworld bosses.
These American Buddhists, drawn East in part by a rejection of Gilded Age ostentation, recognized a set of preoccupations like those they knew already — Whitman's vision of a self that could shift and contain multitudes, or Thoreau's secular withdrawal from the race of life.
If the reply is a churlish "for me to know and you to find out," who can blame him or her? Being asked to justify a preoccupation is like being grilled about the attractions of a hobby or a sweetheart.
According to Islamic Mystics, the heart free from worldly preoccupation is like a mirror that reflects the beauty of the divine.
Critics lambasted boarding schools for their war-like preoccupation with sport and physical prowess (the "tyranny of games").
