"I feel like this is going to be quite a long video," Ruby says. And what better way to guarantee that her video is longer than it needs to be than to insert long chunks of recycled footage from nearly four months ago?
October 2021:
August 2021:
Ruby starts as she means to go on, by rambling incoherently for several minutes. Her first topic is fire, and how she doesn't restrict lighting candles directly on or next to fuel sources to just the month of October; fire hazards are for life, not just for Autumn as far as Ruby is concerned.
At least she's temporarily stopped using gas lighters to light her perpetually wonky candles, but Ruby "Super Sustainable" Granger still hasn't switched to an electric one, that just wouldn't be "aesthetic".
Find someone who looks at you the way Ruby looks at the fires she starts.
Ruby claimed to have read Stephen King's "Shank-Shaw Redemption" not long ago, but there's another King book that seems far more up her alley...
Nobody is safe from Ruby's firestarting, not even herself. Deciding that putting a used matchstick on the candlestick's tray or somewhere safe wouldn't be aesthetic, in her attempt to put it somewhere else, she
leans across an open flame and almost sets her fucking sleeve on fire...
(Pictured: A complete fucking idiot.)
After rambling nonsense about candles and fire with an almost gleefully surreptitious look on her face, as if she's secretly imagining burning down the homes of anyone who ever gave her a bad grade, she moves on to rambling about how it's October, which she's been droning on about endlessly for several months. Ruby at least brings some educational factoids to the table: After October comes November. Ruby bringing her research skills out in force for that one.
But even though it's October and October is the best month ever and you should embraces the Octobereyness of it all, Ruby has already been cheating on October by celebrating Christmas for months, apparently. She obsessively rants about Christmas like it's the only signpost of joy in her future, mostly because she'll be at home, latching onto her parents for dear life again and won't have to deal with adulthood.
Ruby looks at Christmas the same way she does childhood. In reality, childhood is all the more precious for being fleeting, much like Christmas, which is a magical time of year because it's a seasonal holiday that comes once a year. Celebrating Christmas for months on end dilutes the whole holiday and waters down that fleeting magic to rote, routine, everyday nothingness, but Ruby's content to do that, just like she's happy to drag her childhood out a few extra decades.
After lots of unrelated rambling, Ruby finally starts getting to the point of the video. University isn't supposed to be the best time of your life, apparently. This is only really news to Ruby, as most people approach uni as a fun, challenging and hopefully rewarding growth experience, where you learn new things, meet new people and get some semi-sheltered experience being independent before you go on to the real world to live the rest of your adult life. But Ruby's conditioned herself to believe academia is the focal point of everything, so it isn't shocking that she felt that university was supposed to be life's high point, and she's done everything she can to push that view onto others up until now.
Ruby briefly wonders if the word "chide" is real after using it in a sentence, and looks it up to find that it is, of course, a real word. Ruby is delighted with herself, and only included this footage of her doubting her language because she believed it was another "Ruby was right all along!" moment captured on camera. She punctuates her self-congratulatory moment with her new faux-Italian "pinch the air" hand gestures:
Ruby continuously blames the system for misleading people regarding university and "adults" for telling people that uni is supposed to be the best time of their lives, while never acknowledging that she herself has been parroting this narrative endlessly, and she's not a child anymore. It's everyone else's fault but Ruby's, and she yet again admits no culpability for romanticising toxic productivity and idealising uni and academia, despite that being all she ever does.
She also never picks up on the fact that most people who graduate uni and look back with nostalgia as the best time of their life do so because they had a tonne of fun with an active social life, with a relatively easy workload, doing new things and it was likely the last time before they had to worry about working all week in an actual job, paying bills, rent, a mortgage. Of course that's going to look amazing in rose-tinted hindsight, but those people probably struggled too at times while actually at uni. Ruby has no interest in nuance or perspective, though. Lying adults sold her a fake bill of goods, and they're to blame.
(Pictured: The world's most disgusting-looking mug.)
Ruby has actively deprived herself of a social life, has never left her bubble of comfort to try the things that most people feel define the uni experience, and she's made the academic work involved take up far more of her time than was necessary so naturally she's not going to have the same fondly-remembered experience. All she'll have to look back on are the endless busywork she forced on herself and having to be away from home. She also won't have to worry about finding a job, paying bills or being a responsible adult after she graduates because of her wealth and privilege.
She claims she's not the only one who feels this way: Everyone she talked to told her that they really struggled to adjust in first year. The key part being "first year". Ruby is in her
fourth year and still hasn't adjusted because she was privileged enough to be able to run home every week, or for months on end. Almost everyone else either got over that shit and adjusted through exposure therapy of sticking it out. Ruby has never adjusted because she just runs home every time she can.
She claims nobody told her in year one that they were also struggling, but it's more likely Ruby never heard about it from anyone because she actively avoided socialising and tuned out any voice that wasn't her own.
Ruby then rambles for what feels like a lifetime about nothing at all, and she breaks out the greatest hits of "I was bullied at school", "It's okay to be different, but if you're different to me, I'll passively-aggressively judge you" and "We need to normalise all the things that I want to do!"
Ruby says it's okay that she's introverted and doesn't socialise, because she has one friend who she spends all he time with. Only that's not healthy when you approach a single friendship as intensely as Ruby does with Blakeney, co-opting all her time and imitating all her mannerisms, wardrobe and habits. She even admits to "romanticising" the fact that she lives with her best friend, which sounds both obsessive and weirdly detached. It's not going to leave her in a great place when Blakeney moves on with her life after graduation.
She takes the same self-centred approach to going home all the time. It's okay to be homesick and go home if you are. Only Ruby isn't just homesick. She's
obsessively reliant on her parents, at the expense of her own physical and mental health, as evidenced by the entire last year of steady mental and physical decline and her current timetable of being in constant contact with her parents throughout the entire day at uni, writing endless letters to them a day after seeing them. She claims that going home leaves her recharged and in a better mood when she goes back to uni, which we can clearly see is bullshit by how miserable she looks at uni constantly. She's not emotionally equipped for adult life by any stretch of the imagination.
She also says it's now fine that she goes home all the time because it's not hurting anyone or inconveniencing anyone - John Stuart Mills says so; it's a free country! We have personal liberties and we must exercise them! This from Ruby, who drags her parents hundreds of miles to pick her up from uni when she can easily afford to get the train if she wants to go home so much. She makes her parents take all their holidays in Devon to be next to her. She makes them cut holidays short to attend to her childish whims, then throws tantrums when they're late even if she's not ready herself .
Not only does this seem like a mentally unhealthy, massively wasteful inconvenience all around, but Martha's sat in Sheffield like chopped liver because Ruby's monopolising all her parents' time and attention. Also Ruby's lip-service crusade for sustainability doesn't hold up to scrutiny when she's having her parents drive a camper van all over everywhere every week for her. But nope, not inconveniencing anyone at all, Rubes.
"I don't know if this was helpful at all," Ruby wonders aloud. It wasn't, Ruby. It was 20+ minutes of rambling nonsense from a self-absorbed child in extreme denial. At least it wasn't sponsored, though.
what a waste of time and money
