wordpress pagination in plugin

I am developing a plugin that requires pagination. I have worked with creation pagination in plugins before… for some reason the paged variable isn’t being set… I have tried using $wp_query->query_vars[‘paged’] and it isn’t set. After that I tried using the global variable $paged and that wasn’t set either… paginate_links() works fine and the url is also fine when I click on the pages… but I can’t seems to retrieve what the current page is… I guess I could just get the current url and use regex to get the current page, but I’d rather not waste my time doing that..

Any ideas?