why are my ical appointments greyed out

I have (finally) managed to get my google calendar to sync properly to my macbook pro iCal; however, all of the meeting requests that were sent to my gmail account show up in iCal as "grey" even though they say they are from my green coloured calendar in the left panel. Why is this? (I'm going to be totally honest here, I hate iCal, it has been the bain of my existence since I got my mac, can someone help me? I'm so dicouraged.)