Notepad? Do you mean Stickies? It's either a glitch (which I have never noticed) or you are imagining it
The background gradient of the sticky note might be confusing your eyes (light > dark with a consistent font colour).
yeah, the stickies. and no it's not a diff gradient or anything, because i can delete whatever is on the pad that was in grey, and retype on it and it'll be blacker.
i don't think it's the actual widget, because this happened before i reformatted my computer (due to other problems), and i reformatted a couple weeks ago