Picking a Beat in NYC

It has been awhile since I've posted last. Finishing up a thesis, graduating, and moving twice consumed a fair amount of time. And all that work has landed me here-Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
After being here only three days, I have little to report on other than my relief in discovering that New York City is not home to intimidating packs of Sex and the City divas. I had worried moving from the Bay to "the city," from undergraduate to graduate, would require a leap of sophistication I was not prepared to make. But no worry, most of New York's population is on the same side of the platform with me. Riding the train from the Upper West Side all the way downtown and across the river to Brooklyn offered a glimpse of the sorts of odds and ends people that constitute the city. From the hopelessly chic to the obliviously disheveled, New York has it all. Perhaps most shocking was the discovery that New York has a large elderly population. I don't have the numbers but they have at least enough to create a solid majority on a bus headed downtown along Broadway any given day. One stop after the other, old women climbed into the bus and, just as I offered my seat to the new arrival, she just as quickly offered the seat to her equally elderly friend who boarded with her. Tough old broads.
I could use a little bit of tough old broad to get me through the next few weeks as I begin my graduate work. We set out tomorrow to select a "beat" or neighborhood of the city. Over the next five months that neighborhood will be our second home in the sense that it will sometimes make us feel unwanted and it will sometimes teach us lessons we could not learn anywhere else. Can you tell my nervousness is mostly wrapped up in anxious expectations? High expectations? I can't wait to eat the food, shop in the corner stores, walk the streets, see the homes of "my" neighborhood. I can't wait to plead with what will at first seem an unyielding density of otherness, to beg the streets to please guide me through a story I know nothing of. I guess this is my first dispatch from the field, the dream landscape of field I have been walking throughout these opening days of school.
I don't know that I want to be a journalist. At the core I think I want to be a better friend. See, I have a friend who always knows the right question to ask-that question that gets past the noise to the voice of an issue while assuring the person being asked that they will find a sensitive person waiting on the other side of the exchange. She does this all the time. With friends, with strangers, with teachers, with kids. Perhaps I can do it professionally and then eventually personally. Perhaps I can start to truly value the thoughts of everyone I encounter. I suspect this is the sort of spirit that keeps people in love with an odds and ends city like New York, so in love that they keep riding that bus even though the few stairs to get there are a challenge. I think I'm ready to fall in love.