Ruby Granger #18 Still no deal with Waterstones but half her food was mailed from home

[gossip_guy]

Also, while I’m here and have a bev in hand, can we just talk once more about her obnoxious use of emojis? She’s on her way home for reading week, and I quote, ””. What does that even bleeping mean? She’s better than all of us because 1) she’s taking the train for bleeping once, 2) she’s going to be READING next week unlike us plebs, 3) other, please specify? (lol the premise is she’s better than us, we all know she’s a smug witch)

I use exclusively for passive-aggressive ”duck you” purposes, please let me know if there’s another way to interpret it.

Four angel emojis. Four members of her immediate family. She's planning to murder-suicide her family; they'll all be together forever soon in that big Victorian boarding school in the sky.

 

[Deeandra2020]

Ruby: I don’t want to spend much time at home

also ruby: *goes home for a week*

 

[Scapier88]

Ruby: I don’t want to spend much time at home

also ruby: *goes home for a week*

Its half term school is closed we all know Ruby is still mentally 12

 

[howaboutnot]

I love how she’s making an effort to paw at non-children’s-books, it adds an aura of mystery to her videos. Could she ACTUALLY be reading something that’s longer than 8 pages? Could she be *gasp* looking up some of the words she misuses on a daily basis? Out of a real dictionary that also (be still my heart) provides phonetic transcription?

Chance would be a fine thing! It looks like she's pointing either at the Russian Visual Dictionary or Collins Russian Dictionary. Unless she's planning on learning Russian I don't think they'll be much help with her English...

 

[GoinDowntown]

””. What does that even bleeping mean? She’s better than all of us because 3) other, please specify?

They are just regular smiley faces with rainhats on of course!

 

[gossip_guy]

Ruby: I don’t want to spend much time at home

also ruby: *goes home for a week*

Let's be fair to Ruby, she's clearly fully independent now.

It's been a whole six weeks since she went home to her family, not counting the family visits, family weddings, family holidays, letters, phone calls, video calls, emails, telegrams, carrier pigeons, carrier flies (RIP all the fly test pilot messengers who didn't make it past the windowsill) and sustainable plane message banners.

Plus she's getting the train by herself! Who cares if she probably just agreed to meet her parents "half-way" by taking the train to the next stop and only making them drive 185 miles each way instead of 186 - she's still out there doing it for herself with 0.0007% less help from mummy and daddy.

She can tick off "Be Independent" on her planners and to-do lists as completed now - she's nailed it. And she knows the definition of independence - she touched the spine of a dictionary mere days ago!

 

[smellsofbiscuits]

I'm sorry but did she just call reading week a *holiday*? Jeezoh It may sound like a holiday but it's a nod to how much reading and textual analysis you have to do for an English Lit degree that students get a week of no classes. I don't know how it works in England but if you're doing joint Honours then you don't get a "holiday" as you still have to attend your other subject's lectures etc.

All I remember from reading week was how stressed the English Lit students seemed to be.

 

[marcelprout]

Personally, seeing her last few Instagram stories just makes the difference from how obviously miserable she's been looking these past few weeks all the more glaring. I really do feel like she's feeling trapped by this niche she's carved out for herself online and there's no other way but to try to convince herself how much she loves her uni lifestyle and how grateful she is for it by constantly repeating how it's "SO, SO interesting and SO rewarding"... I might be completely wrong, these are just the vibes I'm getting from her recent postings

 

[lizzie2707]

I'm sorry but did she just call reading week a *holiday*? Jeezoh It may sound like a holiday but it's a nod to how much reading and textual analysis you have to do for an English Lit degree that students get a week of no classes. I don't know how it works in England but if you're doing joint Honours then you don't get a "holiday" as you still have to attend your other subject's lectures etc.

All I remember from reading week was how stressed the English Lit students seemed to be.

For me (in Scotland) everyone got the same week ‘off’, so there would be no classes running across the uni. But yeah, the uni made a big point of stressing that it wasn’t a holiday, they called it ‘Independent Learning Week’, because it’s a week for catching up on all your work and preparing for the rest of the semester. I just looked at an old calendar, and I had deadlines due right after ILW (my degree was classics and English), so yeah I always spent the entire week reading for/writing essays. I’d take the weekend preceding ILW completely off, because I did need a break (we had super long terms so everyone was already burnt out by then lol), but the actual week was spent panic working.

 

[threeSMEGfridges]

For me (in Scotland) everyone got the same week ‘off’, so there would be no classes running across the uni. But yeah, the uni made a big point of stressing that it wasn’t a holiday, they called it ‘Independent Learning Week’, because it’s a week for catching up on all your work and preparing for the rest of the semester. I just looked at an old calendar, and I had deadlines due right after ILW (my degree was classics and English), so yeah I always spent the entire week reading for/writing essays. I’d take the weekend preceding ILW completely off, because I did need a break (we had super long terms so everyone was already burnt out by then lol), but the actual week was spent panic working.

I did combined Hons and English was my major at Uni. I still had my partime job to go to though all my humanities classes were not on. I used to stay at Uni then go home for a long weekend. Still had a fuckton of reading to get ahead on for the forthcoming term and I used to go to to “home Uni” (ie not my Uni) library to read things there I couldn’t get at home.

TBF it does usually coincide with the UK state school October 1/2 term and some of my friends used it to visit home and see younger siblings etc and took their work with them

 

[Magpie02]

I'm sorry but did she just call reading week a *holiday*? Jeezoh It may sound like a holiday but it's a nod to how much reading and textual analysis you have to do for an English Lit degree that students get a week of no classes. I don't know how it works in England but if you're doing joint Honours then you don't get a "holiday" as you still have to attend your other subject's lectures etc.

All I remember from reading week was how stressed the English Lit students seemed to be.

And she's lucky she's studying in the UK. I did my undergrad degree in English and German lit in Germany where we don't have reading weeks, we're expected to cope with the workload as the term progresses.

 

[passiflorae]

Imagine you are in your last year of university and all you do is count the weeks you've been away from home...

On the other hand, when she emphasises that "for her" is a long time, it's the same with the jeans or the make-up a year ago (that "I'm not cool enough" video). These are the thoughts of a pre-teen discovering the world, and it's very VERY worrying for a 21 yo.

 

[gossip_guy]

Personally, seeing her last few Instagram stories just makes the difference from how obviously miserable she's been looking these past few weeks all the more glaring. I really do feel like she's feeling trapped by this niche she's carved out for herself online and there's no other way but to try to convince herself how much she loves her uni lifestyle and how grateful she is for it by constantly repeating how it's "SO, SO interesting and SO rewarding"... I might be completely wrong, these are just the vibes I'm getting from her recent postings

I have no doubt that if it weren't for her being online, she'd have been going home every week again. She's not been staying at Exeter for any personal developmental growth or because she loves it there, she's been doing it to try to prove the people pointing out how overdependent on her parents she is wrong. All the pointed, defensive comments and posts she's been making about going home only make it that much more obvious.

So she's miserable because she has to be away from home and be something resembling a grownup again for extended periods of time, but she's also not proving anything to anyone since she's still running home far too often and using every possible means and opportunity to contact her parents multiple times a day.

Imagine if she actually got into Oxford. She'd have never lasted there since she'd have had to stay away from home far more, and that's before factoring in the higher standards and comparatively more demanding workloads.

 

[July9696]

It’s literally called “reading week”, she’s supposed to be studying. I don’t really care that she’s going home as she’ll study there but the fact she’s now in her FOURTH year of uni and 6 weeks is the longest she’s spent away from home... I get people are home bodies but you’d hope you’d be able to do a full term away at this point

 

[Underjoyed]

Imagine you are in your last year of university and all you do is count the weeks you've been away from home...

Is it really her last year? Won't she continue with a masters degree?

 

[gossip_guy]

It’s literally called “reading week”, she’s supposed to be studying. I don’t really care that she’s going home as she’ll study there but the fact she’s now in her FOURTH year of uni and 6 weeks is the longest she’s spent away from home... I get people are home bodies but you’d hope you’d be able to do a full term away at this point

Well, with Ruby's definition of "reading", she might as well call it "skim the synopsis, mark it 'read' and give it 5 stars week".

 

[GoinDowntown]

Personally, seeing her last few Instagram stories just makes the difference from how obviously miserable she's been looking these past few weeks all the more glaring. I really do feel like she's feeling trapped by this niche she's carved out for herself online and there's no other way but to try to convince herself how much she loves her uni lifestyle and how grateful she is for it by constantly repeating how it's "SO, SO interesting and SO rewarding"... I might be completely wrong, these are just the vibes I'm getting from her recent postings

I actually think it was a blessing in disguise that she didn't get into Oxford. Imagine if she'd gotten in and was as miserable as she is now (if not more so considering the workload).
Getting her lifelong dream and hating it? It would fuel an identity crisis.

 

[becca N]

I am a uni student at university of central Lancashire (UCLAN) I have a reading week for my criminology module but I am still in lectures for my psychology part of degree and I am already planning how to use they days I am not in uni due to my criminology modules not being on for me to make sure I am doing the research I need for my assignments and catching up on lecture notes as I have dyslexia so it takes me time to do my notes. ruby calling it a holiday is beyond a joke your to use the time to catch up on work and make sure you are ready for the rest of the semester

 

[CatCafe234]

I actually think it was a blessing in disguise that she didn't get into Oxford. Imagine if she'd gotten in and was as miserable as she is now (if not more so considering the workload).
Getting her lifelong dream and hating it? It would fuel an identity crisis.

I still can’t quite work out why she went to Exeter at all. I know it’s RG and has a good reputation for English (and the JK Rowling link …) but Ruby choosing to go there almost feels like another knee jerk reaction to not getting into Oxford, in much the same vein as her deciding to do Theology. It’s almost as if she thought ‘if I can’t read English Lit at Oxford then I won’t do English at all, and if I can’t go to Oxford then I’ll go to a uni that’s really, really far away even though I know I get terribly homesick’, and didn’t think what that would practically mean. I know the pandemic has messed everything up, and that Ruby wanted a ‘country’ uni but even a central London uni would probably have been better for her in terms of getting home easily - hell, she could even have lived at home and commuted, it’s not like she can’t afford a railcard. Ruby seems to have had really poor advice about university. Either that or she didn’t listen to what she was being told.

 

[phantomsbaebe]

Am I awful for thinking her parents should encourage her to stay at school until Christmas? How on earth is Ruby ever to become truly independent if she runs home all the time? I didn't go to uni but my husband did and he had to work two jobs as well as study and didn't have the time or space to run home when he wanted to. Ruby is so unbelievably lucky to have the option of studying for four years while being supported by her parents, running home as often as possible and that being acceptable. As a mum myself, I think I'd limit her to one visit every 8 weeks. Parenting is not all about indulging what your child wants; it's about giving your child what they need and what Ruby needs is to be fully independent for longer periods of time. If it were me, I'd say a weekend in November, Christmas, a weekend in March, Easter, then summer when term ends. Frankly, she's so lucky she doesn't have to work to make it more complicated. It's ridiculous that at 21 she cannot go for longer than six weeks without seeing her parents. Harsh but true I'm afraid....