So you do all this reading about getting such good odds that you "have to call" or you are pot committed, well what do you do when you are on the river and your opponent goes all in and has you covered with a 99.9999% chance you are beat. pot odds? astronomical. still I am beat.

happened in one of my first live games yesterday. Long story short: 3 players in hand, villain goes all in on river and has me covered with 4 to a straight on the board and I've got 2pair, I knew i was beat, there was absolutely no question, now the pot was like over 8x (at least) my remaining stack, so i called.. bleh.

the pot was huge in relation to my remaining stack because there was 3 players betting all 3 streets.

Then why did it take until the river for stacks to go in?

Stop slowplaying.

I try not to make the mistake of looking at pot odds on the river. While you can be in situations where you can say "The pot lays 3 to 1, so I only have to be right a quarter of the time to break even in the long run", if you've narrowed villain's range to a small bunch of hands, most of which beat you, then your winning chances are never close to the pot odds. You don't win a quarter of the time in the long run; you lose right now.
With certain action, you're only beating a bluff, and folding is the right decision, whatever odds the pot lays.
This is partly why value bets of 1/3 pot on the river often get called. The caller thinks "I've got such a good price." The bettor thinks "He'll never be able to resist". Easy game.

OP, yes I look at pot odds and I will make crying calls. If we extend this concept to it's logical extreme, if you have T-high and it costs 1c to call a $1 million dollar pot, knowing that villain must have 9-high for you to win, do you call? Because you should.

Now if the pot is $100 and villain bets $20 OTR and we have him covered...calling with T-high is likely to be pretty bad.

Without knowing more about your real life hand, which I really don't want to, it's hard to know if calling is correct. It probably is though.

1) Get it in earlier on a drawy board with 2 pair

2) Or if that 4th straight card hit OTT, you could concider folding then.

3)... Dont ever blindly call and not have a plan for future streets... I dont know much about the hand, but when you call the turn and are committed after, on such a draw... why not jam?

Buy Professional No Limit Hold Em: Volume 1 - will directly fix the thought process error you have had here.