My advice is to stay away from all the appendant bodies for at least a year and stay with the Blue Lodge. During that time, you will be repeatedly asked to join everything in your area. Ask questions of the men recruiting you.
I was lucky. My daughter wrote a paper for her Cultural Anthropology class on Freemasonry and asked me to come along with her when she interviewed Most Worshipful Donald G. Hicks at the Grand Lodge building in Boston. He answered all my questions and reinforced the advice I got from others to wait at least a year. You can read the paper here:
Freemasonry Ethnography Paper