I was watching television last night when the first news of the explosions in Sinai came through. Like most Israelis, I'm an old hand at watching the news. What does this mean? It means that you wait for the first reports, full of the words "unconfirmed" and "initial reports say" to segue into more concrete information. It means that you flip from Channel 1 to Channel 2 to Channel 10, to BBC World to Sky News to CNN, searching for "new" news. It means that you snort when the foreign reporters get the names of the places wrong, and the foreign anchor people speculate mindlessly as to whether this attack against Israelis is in response to the Israeli army's actions in Gaza over the past week. Which is so stupid and irresponsible to say, because anyone with half a brain knows that these attacks take a long time to plan and coordinate - much more than a week.

It means that now I'm not so pissed off that I couldn't get to Sinai this weekend: I had to work late on Wednesday and there was no public transport on Thursday because it was a holiday, so I was stuck in Tel Aviv... But wait, are any of my friends in Sinai this weekend? (run through list of friends in my mind - nope, everyone's back already).

It means that you check to see if your sister is online and you start sending instant messages ("have you heard?"), while the TV chatters in the background. And then after an hour or so you realize that you've been watching the same 15 second loop of footage over and over again, that you're not going to learn anything new and you might as well go to sleep. Because sometimes when you watch the news about terrorist attacks the images of bleeding children and crushed buildings become pornographic.

So I got up early to go to yoga class this morning. The sun was shining, as it does every day, all day, from May until November, and everything looks and seems normal - except for that heavy feeling in the air. And tonight I'll go have dinner at the home of friends. I'll play with their children and we'll talk about all sorts of stuff - probably not about the terrorist attacks, 'though.

Today is the day of the annual Love Parade in Tel Aviv. I haven't walked over to Allenby yet to watch, and I'm not sure that I really feel like it, but I doubt that it will be cancelled. Because life really does go on - however much that sounds like a cliche.

Every time these attacks happen, I ask myself the same question: why? What in the world do the people who perpetrate these attacks want to accomplish?

And I remind myself once again that all violent deaths are tragic - whether they occur among vacationing Israelis in the Sinai, or 13 year-old schoolchildren in Gaza.