Therese Vega-Lopez was the first one to arrive. She had just woken up and decided she wanted to know what was going on. It was a very long, chaotic morning, and the crowd was a lot smaller than most of the other events I’ve been to so that makes Saturday a little more tame. So the mood was generally more mellow than I expected. I was surprised that no one was carrying signs, only some local, unedited flyers and the occasional hand-made sign that caught my eye, especially when someone walked up to me and asked me what I was doing. I didn’t know what they were asking me about. It turned out that the most popular question was about my plan. I hadn’t planned to go to the conference just yet.

The conference on Saturday started a little weird. There were a few more people in the streets outside the convention center than there were inside. I got the sense that people were a little afraid to speak out, and that people felt they had less space to express themselves than they thought. But there wasn’t really any real tension or anything like that. Most people just seemed to be in a good mood, and all the people I had spoken to were extremely gracious, friendly, and excited about the conference. On the floor, though, things got slightly uncomfortable.

I’d been out for a couple of days by then, and my brain was still on the floor. A couple of things had started to show up in my head that weren’t originally there, so I was starting to go off on the side of trying to solve general cognitive dissonance that I might have felt in the last couple days, and that kind of thinking is still very difficult to get one’s head into.

The main problem I’d seen in previous conferences had been in the crowds, on the convention hallways, which were still mostly filled with people I wouldn’t want to cross street without looking, even outside of the convention center. In all my discussions, I thought that being in the center was a huge safety improvement, because it might not be full of drunk people in the middle of the day. If you were just a foot or two away from me, you wouldn’t feel the immediate threat of being mugged, but you knew if something happens, it’d be something violent like someone running up to you, grabbing you, and throwing you on the ground. That could happen pretty quickly.

But when