Luck and the merry-go-round of life

There are times in life where you realize you've just come full circle.  That's been happening to me over the last few weeks, and I have to laugh because, honestly, there is a bit of irony to life. But I'm optimistic about what it means to come full circle, and this optimism stems from a belief that the best merry-go-round rides are those where you stop and start at the exact same point.

I didn't create this belief on my own.  I actually heard it when I was about 8 years old, from another girl who explained that it was lucky to stop and start at the same spot. I have no idea where she came up with this concept, but, being 8 years old, I adopted it.  Since then, if I'm on a carnival ride, I always want the guy to end the ride so I finish at the same point I started.  Thirty years later, and I still love to test my luck on those merry-go-round rides.

So. How is my life coming around full circe? I'm going to share this in theorem fashion.  Actually, I'm not totally sure this is in theorem format.  What little I remember about them comes from my 10th grade geometry class where I learned that I needed to end everything with "Q.E.D.".  I don't know the translation, but it means "it's been proven" or something like that.  That's pretty much all I learned in geometry, and I only learned that about 3/4 of the way through the semester when I noticed I was getting points taken off for forgetting to end with Q.E.D. and I could write pretty much anything and, as long as I put Q.E.D. at the end, I'd get partial credit.  I love partial credit.  In other words, feel free to give me partial credit for the following theorem:

August 2010: I'm in marketing. I'm in the pharmaceutical industry.
September 2010: I'm not in marketing. I'm not in the pharmaceutical industry. I'm in France eating baguettes, drinking wine and learning French.
January 2011: I'm not IN marketing, but I'm teaching marketing. I'm giving some marketing advice.
May 2011: I'm teaching marketing. I'm consulting about marketing. But I'm not in the pharmaceutical industry.
September 2011: I'm teaching marketing. I'm consulting about marketing. I'm consulting about a genetic company start-up. But genetics isn't pharma, right?
November 2011: I'm teaching marketing. I'm preparing to teach a class about pharmaceutical marketing (see where the irony starts?). I'm consulting about genetics. I'm reading a textbook about the pharmaceutical industry and it's talking about DNA, how it's being sequenced and the application to clinical research.  I switch to working on my consulting project about genetics.  I open a document and read a debate about sequencing DNA de novo (from scratch) versus using a shotgun approach. I go back to my textbook. Same content. Suddenly, I realize:

I'm in marketing. I'm in the pharmaceutical industry.

I'm on a very funny merry-go-round ride.  But it's not a bad place to be.

Q.E.D.