how to mark irony?

So this came to mind STRONGLY yesterday when I had sent a photo of a bunch of sunflowers in a yellow pitcher,  so very van Gogh in feeling,  sent to me by Lee Hallman in Fort Worth and I had sent the picture of it along side the New York Times as the two images were  so remarkably contradictory,  of course. That is, the of course, was no way of course. What was not my surprise to receive a few messages saying how optimistic I seem to be and the times were so contrary to that! I started wondering how you mark irony  in case you need to do that.
Here I am in New York after having my shoulder changed at the Hospital for Special Surgery and I'm thinking perhaps I will start my journal,  that is the blog again. Why not?

vermouth

I  know there is a best-selling book called something like "hello, vodka, it's Chelsea calling" -- I like vodka also,
but am liking dry white vermouth a lot also, and how nice it is there and I am here

Having just decided to take not just a semester sabbatical but a really really whole year, before the panic sets in about what in the world am I doing to do this, I think joy should set in -- I have all these old notebooks I have never looked at, I  have always wanted to write a fiction about my grandmother the painter, in paris, and I want to write on Pascal, and I want not to feel always having to rush here and there -- now will this change THAT, I don't know, but it is not a bad idea to muse upon it...

something about if you are so lucky as to live here, then do just that, LIVE here.. then when I get back after that year, I can teach my film course about The Anxiety of Representation -- about which films work with which texts, and we will read Virginia Woolf and see films about her, etc. Van Gogh and T.S. Eliot and all that -- hope it will work!

in any case, I don't seem to be doing a lot of writing when I am teaching, but I surely do love teaching, which is really just meeting with truly intelligent young people and talking with them about what we are reading, and hearing what they are doing with the reading -- I  mean that is what teaching Ph.D. students is about, I think