Stuck function keys? Very confused...

Not sure what's going on with my macbook....

First I was noticing that whatever window was my focus, has a black box around something. Currently in firefox, it's a box around the X button. When I'm just on the desktop, it'll be around an icon. When it's a program that has no windows open, it'll just be a big box on the screen.

And now my function keys are doing other things. I went to adjust the volume. When I press f12 for volume up, it brings up the dashboard. When i press volume down, it makes all the windows jump away to the sides of the screen, and i can see the desktop. When i press mute, it shrinks the window a bit, and lets me select a window to change focus to, but only shows me the window i was already in. Pressing fast forward shows me all windows. Below that, none of the F keys do anything outside of what they would do in firefox anyway.

So what the heck is going on?

Update... when i hold the Function key and press any F key, it does what it is supposed to when i'm not holding the key...

Go to System Preferences> Keyboard and Mouse> Keyboard.

There is a check box at the bottom. If it is checked your function keys will act like they normally would - F1, F2, F12 etc etc - and when you hold the function key and press them you will get whatever else the key is for (brightness, volume, etc). If it's not checked it'll be the other way round.

Ok, thanks. It was checked. I don't know how that happened, because it suddenly switched in the middle of while I was working.