Where's the Table of Contents? (Article Class)

Question

Where is my table of contents? I looked at Table of contents using article and report classes and here's my MWE. According to the commentators, everything down three levels should appear--but the ToC file (yes, I ran LaTeX twice) is a zero byte file, hence no ToC is being generated.

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{ulem}
\usepackage{amsmath}
%\usepackage{tocloft}  didn't do anything. 
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\lhead{\footnotesize{important info}}
\chead{}
\rhead{}
\lfoot{}
\cfoot{}
\rfoot{\footnotesize{less-important info}}
\title{boring article}
\author{troubled author}
\date{}
%\setcounter{tocdepth}{3} this is the default. I've tried other values.
\usepackage{mathpazo} nice fonts.
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
\begin{center}\textbf{Part $[$1$]$: General Provisions}\end{center}
\section*{Article $[$1$]$ Definitions}
 Blah blah blah
\section*{Article $[$2$]$ More Definitions} 
Blah blah
\end{document}

What am I missing? Is the fancyheader package interfering?

Answer 1

To summarize the tips in the comments:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\begin{document}

\tableofcontents

\section*{I'm not in the toc}
 Blah blah blah
\section{I'm in the toc and I'm numbered}
Blah blah blah

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-1}
\section{I'm in the toc and I'm not numbered}

Blah blah blah
\end{document}