Obseshes are also the bleakest, most-worst preoccupations, which are just as likely to dominate a subconscious/conscious/conscience as whatever it is you're bopping around to and loving (which for me, right now, is basically everything on television?).
Even more troubling, extreme arachnophobia can be a direct route to the worst sort of agoraphobia: a crippling preoccupation with the enemy invading the sanctuary of home via countless imperceptibly tiny chinks and gaps.
Its preoccupation with internal problems helped spare it the worst of America's subprime-mortgage fiasco.
"We want you to be different, but not TOO different," one tutor told Which?, a whimsical preoccupation, perhaps, when English teenagers are ranked the world's worst for literacy and not much better at maths.
"Of all my assignments for Somos, covering the pageant was by far the worst, having to rhapsodize on Miss Boyacá's Pepsodent smile, Miss Tolima's dubious virginity, Miss Arauca's preoccupation with poor children".
These twin preoccupations intensified my old misanthropy.
Their preoccupations are mundane, yet vitally important.
These preoccupations recur throughout her work.
Instead there are other preoccupations, other motivations.
Gelon did indeed have his own preoccupations.
These preoccupations seeped into her fiction.
